What's on your library website?

My friend and colleague David Loertscher send me a link to his newest creation: The Virtual Learning Commons - a thoughtful template for a useful, collaborative, and comprehensive school library website. He writes:

Thought you might enjoy taking a look at a Virtual Learning Commons template that my students and I have developed as we have looked across a couple of years development attempting to replace the boring and dead library websites.  I am debuting it in Syracuse on Wed and a couple of workshops.

It turns the library website into a giant collaborative and each major page can allow approved teachers and students to post alongside other experts in the school.  Anyway, it is simple to just download the template, rename it to your school and start building...

Here is the url: https://sites.google.com/site/templatevlc/

As a profession, we've been building webpages for our libraries for, what, 15 years or more? Yet in my experience, school websites display a huge range of features, content, readability, design sense, and usefulness. Do we need some specific conventions that all librarians should abide by when constructing their libraries pages? I'll start with seven that seem to be no-brainers. (Dr. Loetscher's VLC pages can be comprehensive; I'll be barebones.)

Every school library web site must display:

1. The name and location of the school of which it is a part, both a contact phone number and e-mail address, and the date the page was last updated.
2. Links to its electronic resources including its library catalog, databases, and e-book collections.
3. Calendars of library-related events and links to calendars with schedules of class visits, lab bookings, etc.
4. The library mission statement, its long-range goals, and current objectives.
5. Link to the latest library newsletter, annual report, and up-to-date usage data.
6. Link to lists of recently acquired new resources.
7. Link to forms for requesting materials.

In our district with its dozen school libraries, we've worked toward a balance of commonality of content, organization, and design among all of them, while still allowing librarians to create sites that reflect each program's unique attributes. It's a balance for sure.

Developing some common standards for all school library webpages would be good for libraries, but would be especially helpful for library users. 

Comments

[Kathy Kaldenberg]

Thanks for posting this Doug. I hope to update our district's media services site this summer and was planning to use Google Sites. This is the perfect template for a great start. I added it to a collection of Google Sites examples at: sqworl.com/e3gjuv

[Len Bryan]

I agree with the 7 basic features you mention, but I would like to add design and search components. Our students, staff, and parents have largely become accustomed to visiting and using web sites that have a high degree of design. Some of this design is useful, such as shadowing the background of the site and highlighting the content upon which the user is focused (Netflix's new interface is an example), some of this design is social, such as YouTube's integration of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. Most often, however, highly utilized websites tend to be gateways to other content, such as Google, Bing, and Wikipedia (the authority of the content is another matter entirely).

These gateways have one thing in common - a rich search function. Our library web pages can offer much to our users, but until we create federated searching of all library content with one search bar, we will continue to play second fiddle to Google and others. I realize that getting vendors such as EBSCO, Gale, ABC-Clio, World Book, etc. to the same table to facilitate a federated search is about as likely as brokering a permanent peace between Israel and Palestine, but the conversation needs to continue to take place. When we can show our users that they have the ability to search all of our resources with one interface, our website usage and satisfaction numbers will skyrocket. We might actually lure some of our students away from quick, superficial, (and often wrong) answers they find in commercial search results. Of course, quality research assignments can help us do this as well, but that is the subject for yet another conversation.

[Doug Johnson]

Hi Kathy,

Thanks for link to the library websites. Quite a collection. GoogleSites makes it pretty easy to design good pages. Even if a district uses another webhost, the content and organization should transfer.

Doug

Hi Len,

Great points. While I was mainly interested in content in this post, the addition of a good search engine on the site is critical indeed. Every time we've done usability studies, the kids especially go right to the search field trying to find anything. Design is for another post! (My first rule - NO ANIMATED GIFS!

Doug

[Victoria Zadeh]

I have searched and searched and asked so many fellow teachers, but I cannot see how to alter on the template home page, far left--Your Schhol VLC" columnn.

The instructions on Loertscher's template say there is a link but there is not! please help!

[Kathy Kaldenberg]

Victoria, It's in Manage Site > Sidebar gadget. Here's my mockup. I didn't roll it out this year, but maybe next. https://sites.google.com/a/solon.k12.ia.us/shs-media-center/

[Doug Johnson]

Thanks, Kathy and Victoria. Question asked and answered?

Doug