I feel like I spend a lot of my free, non-work time trying to navigate Chicago city websites. For some insane reason, I have the city’s For Residents page as my homepage on my home computer. If the page were ever updated, it would give me updates about news and events in the city every time I open Firefox. Instead, I’ve been looking at the smoking ban announcement for five months. The city’s website is full of great information, but damned if I can find it when I want to. The search tool is worse than useless, the site goes down almost as much as ALA’s, and there is so much redundant information and dead-ends that you can never find the same thing twice.
When I was in library school, I used the Chicago Public Library website a lot, both off-site and on. The entire website was comprised of lists of links. To get to the list of useful links, which included a link to the clunky OPAC, you had to click through something that was primarily text. Every page was white with green text. There were no pictures. There were no side bars. I don’t remember the navigation tools, but I’m sure they were not impressive.
Today, I went to the Chicago Public Library website to grab a link to the OPAC for the 826CHI reference wiki and look at them now! They look like a proper public library, rather than a bureaucratic department of the city of Chicago. There’s color, there’s pictures of users, there promotional buttons for library programming and events, there’s a user-friendly catalog. I was so impressed, I sent them a note to let them know what a tremendous improvement this new website is over the old one.
This summer, the COD Library rolls out a new iteration of our homepage along with new catalog pages. We’ve already had some mild controversy amongst librarians as we make changes, and most troubling for some, add more content to the clean white space of our current homepage. A homepage should probably always be in the tweaking stage, but it’s always easier to add than it is to remove. Do users prefer the stark simplicity of a Google search page or the everything you need at your fingertips full-screen commerce of Amazon? Are libraries trying to do both at the same time? And is it a feasible to attempt such a mashup?
And yes, I still owe you LOEX notes…
[...] Public Library only recently brought their website into the 21st century, way behind those of most other large public library systems, I would say. [...]