Sorry folks for the lack of live-blogging. Despite Jenny and I being at Internet Librarian 2007, the conference has a shameful lack of internet connectivity. Jenny also has a computer which likes to delete her notetaking on a whim. Stay with us for future developments…
This post on Walking Paper got me thinking (again) about the state of library websites. It’s hard for me to admit that most library sites make me want to cry blood. After all, designing for libraries is a big part of my job. But I’d venture to say that most of us who work on library web interfaces are librarians who happen to like web design and not web designers who stumbled into librarianship. And while I’m sure we’d all agree that we want functional, usable and visually appealing sites that our users want to use, there’s probably a small minority of librarians out there who really have 40 hours a week to devote to this task. And that’s mostly because we’re not talking about a handful of pages here - my Libraries’ website, just as an example, has about 20 gatrillion sub pages that have to be dealt with. When I redesigned the website for UNC’s House Undergraduate Library as a field experience project in graduate school, it took me about 3 months of pretty solid work to get maybe 2-3 dozen pages moved into a new design. The implications for a site as large as those maintained by most academic libraries is nearly enough to make you feel like you finally understand the urban legend about Pop Rocks and Coke making you explode.
But that was all just a long intro to serve as a disclaimer that I’m not recommending that all libraries go out and undertake full redesigns. But as our institutions think into the future, it’s really important to consider that having a pretty site (that is also usable and accessible, of course) can be something that attracts users.
I really appreciated Ellen’s efforts to go forth and find lovely library websites, though I will admit that most of them left me feeling a little eh. But a few days ago, a colleague was showing me the website for The Art Institute of Chicago (FYI, they have little tiny rooms there), and I was suddenly inspired. As a grad assistant, I was lucky enough to do some fun original web design, and I frequently checked out museum websites for inspiration. Since I’ve started my real job, I haven’t done a huge amount of design from scratch, so I’ve let that habit go. But remembering it now makes me wonder why library websites can’t be more like museum websites? Museums, of course, are often related to aesthetics in some way, and I’m sure that ups the importance of the pretty factor. But libraries and museums serve similar functions, right? So why not emulate museums a little more? I’m sure that lots of these places have professional designers working for them, but if you take a close look, you’ll see that they’re really pretty simple and clean (that’s why I like them, really). Check out the Smithsonian Museums for more examples.
What do you think? I can see “but we have too much content to make sites like these!” being an argument, but I’m not sure that’s really the case. Sure, we have lots of online content, and information architecture can become a big headache, but can’t we still aim to simplify and clean things up?
Last April, the folks at A List Apart (FYI, one of those sites that comes up when you Google “ALA”) launched their massive survey of Web Designers. I took it, since a large part of the job that I had just accepted would be web designing. Well, this past week the survey results just came out, and they are pretty interesting.
I’d love to know more about how many web-designing librarians took the survey. When I see the one statistic that 31% of people who categorized their job title as “Other” work for a school, college or university, I wonder if that’s the librarians representing. In any case, I’m going to download their data (they’ve made it available) and play around with it to see what I can find.
Michael Wesch, a professor of anthropology at Kansas State has produced another thought-provoking look at the state of information in the Web 2.0 world. His previous videos are Information R/evolution and The Machine is Us/ing Us.
This one is called A Vision of Students Today and comes directly from a survey he did with his Cultural Anthropology class.
Jenny! You’re on his campus! How much does he interact with the library and/or librarians or the other way around?
I know you all are always look for more website eyecandy for design inspiration. And design|snips looks to be an excellent site to find it. It just launched this summer, so it’s pretty new, but keep checking back, or add the RSS feed to your aggregator for your daily dose of eyecandy.
Thanks to this post at Smashing Magazine, I’ve found a couple more resources for doing cross-browser testing.
IE Web Renderer is great - you just have to put in your URL to see how your site looks in IE 5.5, 6 and 7. You can also get a shot of what the differences are between how your site is rendering in 6 and 7.
Browsershots will give you screenshots of how your site looks in Firefox, IE, Opera and Safari as well as a host of lesser known browsers.
And that’s just a taste of what else this article has to offer. Plus it gives the startling statistic that the percentage of people on the internet who use IE7 has surpassed the percentage of Firefox users. (I just feel sorry for them, really…)
To follow up with my previous post, here is my list of beautifully designed academic library websites, for your design inspiration:
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?
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
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
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.
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…
