Friday, October 10, 2008
Week 8 Readings - Content Management System article
This article shows what can be accomplished when IT staff and librarians collaborate. I was very impressed that the GSU staff decided to develop their own system, and I continue to be amazed that vendors aren't providing off the shelf integrated systems for libraries. Robust and mature integrated systems are common in just about every industry but libraries, it seems. I think they paid attention to the important details - lots of user input, and an emphasis on removing design conceptualization and implementation from the users so they could concentrate on content. Even more importantly, they realized the necessity of a coherently designed web page. It is very difficult to navigate a web site with too many different design standards. I was also impressed that they were willing to objectively identify where they need to improve--in training, for example, and that ongoing assessment will be done to keep the system usable and relevant. All in all, an excellent reading on how technology is improving library content management.
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2 comments:
I agree that a website in which all of the pages are similar is easier to navigate and I would think that this would be very important in a setting like a university library. If all your friends made their own page of favorite books and you put them together as a website it might be fun, but difficult to navigate and very unprofessional looking. I think that GSU began this way and transitioned to a more formal, but more easily navigated site. I am also surprised that this is not a service actively marketed to libraries.
I also agree that consistency is very important, not just on library pages, but on just about any web page. Especially in the case of libraries, it is not necessarily lack of content that makes their pages unlikely to be used, but rather the interface.
As for systems provided by vendors, it seems to me that many of the systems used by other industries are not designed for one very specific use, but rather created to be as flexible as possible (many different organizations use the same search engine technology on their sites, for instance). Perhaps libraries should be responsible for determining how to use systems that are already in use.
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