We need something different! I think it is boring! We haven't changed it in over three years. We need to keep up with what's new! It won't take too long!

All of these statements were made by the Public Services staff at the Gonzaga University Foley Library last spring; they were made in reference to the library homepage. These comments and others led to a project this summer to redesign and reshape our face to the university and our patrons. We went into the project without much of an idea of what we wanted but we did know what we were unhappy with, including the following:



Our goal was to make the library homepage more interesting, helpful and informative. All of this had to be done within the very rigid constraints of the university's web content management system (CMS by Microsoft). We could do whatever we wanted within our allotted space on the page as long as we didn't change colors, fonts, want to do flyouts, etc. So we set out to create a new look for the library's web presence realizing we would have to make numerous compromises along the way.

Where did we start? All the Public Services librarians began looking for library web pages they liked, determining what did they have in common, why were we drawn to them, and what could we incorporate from them into our page. We found Library Success: a best practices wiki that provided links to some great sites, it also talked about the problem of jargon and make us think in some new ways. All the Public Services faculty then met with the library web/graphic designer and started discussing what we were looking for and viewed sites that had inspired us. We then turned the project over to our web/graphic designer to come up with a prototype! That of course meant that she had to interface with the campus web team, break the new to us that flyouts wouldn't work the way we wanted them to and eventually present us with a mockup of the new page.

We learned about doing usability testing and rejected it. This was probably not great advice but our time was running out and we wanted something up before school started. We got the mockup from Brenda, added some additional links and decided to go for it giving ourselves about 2 weeks to decide on any additional changes before we froze the page for the rest of the semester. More tweaking was done and in the end we were satisfied. The page may not match our high expectations but we have gotten many good comments and reviews from students and faculty.

During this time the librarians were also busy redesigning our online subject guides which were basically our print guides in electronic format. So coming soon to a Foley webpage, new and improved subject guides - the first ones are set to roll out next week!

The project also really helped us to think of the web pages as more transitory, they need to be looked at on a regular basis and changed when needed to meet the current uses and needs of our students and faculty. Who knows where the new library 2.0 might take us, we already have a wiki, can a blog be far behind?

www.foley.gonzaga.edu