About the Meyer Library Website

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The Old Ways

Over the past few years, Meyer Library has become more and more technologically motivated and has transformed into a hub of digital activity on campus. With its first floor lobby and study room that offer access to computing resources and quiet study spaces twenty-four hours a day throughout the year as well as its second floor computer cluster and multimedia studio which let patrons condense all kinds of audio-visual media into digital formats, Meyer Library is clearly the pioneer in computing on campus.

However, in view of all this progress, Meyer Library’s website has stagnated and is presently a complete misrepresentation of the library itself. Not only are many facts about the library not up-to-date, the website itself is stuck in the Web 1.0 era and is intended for a library that loans out books. For the present-day patron this website is useless:

The Plan for a New Site

This is why the Meyer Library website needs to be rejuvenated in the spirit of the library itself and offer useful Web 2.0-style services to patrons such as:

• A home page that allows for easy access to common tasks such as Equipment Checkout and Poster Printing.
  
  
• A list of Frequently Asked Questions that is updated live throughout the day based on actual questions by patrons and sorted by popularity.
  
  
• A way to easily ask a question to a consultant from the website itself and get a quick response.
  
  
• An extensive database of easy-to-follow tutorials for both common and obscure tasks.
  
  
• A catalog of all items in our inventory and their checkout status.

Overview

This is a mock up of the future Meyer Library website:

 This website improves upon its predecessor in a number of ways:

• Access to the most commonly accessed services (Equipment Checkout, Poster Printing, How-To) is very prominently displayed in the first 480 pixels such that it will be visible without scrolling on even the smallest displays.
  
  
• A prerequisite set of links to websites within the library network that are known to be extremely useful (library hours, maps, etc.) are embedded in the header banner so that they are prominently displayed without taking up extra space on their own.
  
  
• The right-most quarter of the web page is taken up by a list of frequently asked questions in order of popularity.
  
  
• The website is built from the ground up to support more languages than just English; there is a language bar on the top of every web page which allows the user to switch to that language version of the current web page. This is a mock up of the Chinese home page:

User-driven Content

One of the most important sections which will be a part of the new website will be the How-To section. Here patrons can find tutorials for various tasks such as making movies, burning DVDs, transferring files, printing documents, etc. This is a mock up of the main How-To home page:

The idea behind the How-To section is that trained tech consultants at Meyer Library will post articles on various topics, patrons will then read those articles and give suggestions on improvements. The consultants will then edit, rewrite or add more articles based on the feedback from patrons. The patron feedback is a key focus of this new website because it is only the patrons who truly know what they are looking for and it is best to ask them what they want instead of trying to guessing it. This mechanism will let us do just that.

The new Meyer Library website will bring the library's digital representation up to the same standard as the library itself and represent it accurately in its high-technology dynamism.