Beautifully designed library websites, part 2 September 26, 2007

To follow up with my previous post, here is my list of beautifully designed academic library websites, for your design inspiration:

• Yale University Library - just lovely.
• University of California at Berkeley Library - although it does seem rather scrunched up towards the top, it’s a very clean design.
• University of Virginia Library - which is nice until you scroll below the fold - it gets all wonky at the bottom of the page (and it’s not a FF vs. IE thing either, I checked…)
• Ohio University Libraries - I particularly like the way their color-coded “tabs” look

Yesterday, I read on Ubiquitous Librarian, that the Clemson Library website rates the highest for user satisfaction. I took a look at their website, and in terms of design it’s only rather meh, which got me thinking: can you have a really well-designed library website which is both beautiful and functional?

I heart Weather September 25, 2007

So this isn’t exactly Instructional Design related, but I find this Firefox add-on really cool. Forecastfox can give you weather updates right in your task bar. It’s unobtrusive and very handy. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/398

css hacks September 24, 2007

I had become pretty good at making browsers behave, but IE 7 had thrown me for a loop until, I discovered this little hack. If you’re having problems getting a style to render the same way in each browser try this:

height: 500px (recognized by firefox, IE 6, IE 7, etc)
#height:450px (recognized by both IE6 and 7, but will be ignored in firefox)
_height:400px (only recognized by IE 6, and will be ignored by other browsers)

This allows you to set a different style attributes for each browser so the page will render correctly no matter which browser the you are using.

See: http://www.codepost.org/browse/snippets/63 for more details regarding IE6

Beautifully designed library websites, part 1 September 12, 2007

Jenny asked me the other day if I knew of any beautiful library websites. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of any off the top of my head. Sad, isn’t it? I went looking around the web later, and I came up with these three, which I think are visually interesting and nicely designed.

• Free Library of Philadelphia
• Ann Arbor District Library
• Kansas City Public Library

So far, I’ve only been looking at public libraries. In another post I’ll list some beautiful academic library websites. If there are any…

Because you don’t have enough to do… September 4, 2007

ACRL’ s Distance Learning Section’s Instruction Committee (that’s a mouthful) is doing a great thing by asking for librarian-specific feedback for instructional tools. If you’ve got time, check out their survey.