The New Library Web Site
August 3, 2009
Andy Morton, along with others in the Library, and Eric Palmer and the Web Services group have just this morning launched the new University of Richmond Library web site. As Andy mentioned in a message on Twitter this morning, it’s a project he’s been working on since October 2008. I know he’s been thinking about the new site for a lot longer than that.
Much research has been done on how students, faculty, and staff use the library site, and the new design reflects both an effort to help our community access the content they need as efficiently as possible as well as an effor to engage with our community however they want to connect.
One of my favorite features on the new site is the all-in-one search bar at the top of every web page. From one tabbed interface you can search our catalog, our journals, our databases, our research guides, or the library site itself. Just click on a tab and either enter your search terms. It’s a significant step toward the dream of an integrated search across all resources, and I know a lot of work went into the design and functions of this feature.
The new site is more visual than any of our prior library sites, highlighting the library’s services and some of the resources they’ve created. Search through the Richmond Daily Dispatch to read newspaper articles from 1860-1865. Check out our campus paper, The Collegian, with archives online from 1914-2003. Visit Amarica at War 1941-1945 and view documents from the Federal Depository Colelction at UR.
Our library is connected to the social network. Check out Boatwright Everywhere on the library home page to discover links to Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter. Boatwright Library is at the center of our university’s academic life and you can keep up with what’s going on through these links.
Data from the MISO Survey indicate that the frequency of use and importance of library web sites is going down. I will be curious to see how the revisions we’ve made to our web site change the way our community interacts with library resources and services.
What I’m Reading – 8/3/09
August 3, 2009
- The Chronicle of Higher Education
- An Intellectual Movement for the Masses – Positive psychology fights off New Age approaches that detract from ongoing scholarship.
- Will Higher Education Ever Change as It Should? – Robert Zemsky proposes methods for bringing about systemic change in higher education. I’m not certain he does a thorough job of outlining the specific problems he seeks to correct. Zemsky focuses on the Bologna Process in Europe, which “has resulted in greater integration and cooperation.” Those are good goals, but I’m not certain they are what Zemsky finds lacking in US higher education.
- New York Times
- At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus – Fine art today is quickly browsed rather than considered. “So tourists now wander through museums, seeking to fulfill their lifetime’s art history requirement in a day, wondering whether it may now be the quantity of material they pass by rather than the quality of concentration they bring to what few things they choose to focus upon that determines whether they have ‘done’ the Louvre.”
- Google Chief Resigns as Apple Director – Eric Schmidt steps down from the Apple board in a move that’s been anticipated since Google announced their own operating system.
- The Puppy Whisperer – A nice article about training a puppy, perfect for sharing with my animal-enthusiast daughter.
- Slashdot
- Students Settle with Turnitin in Copyright Case – Just beating a deadline for a Supreme Court appeal, students who sued Turnitin have settled.
- Guyland: Chapter 3
- Masculinity is largely a “homosocial” experience: performed for, and judged by, other men.
- Noted playwright David Mamet explains why women don’t even enter the mix. “Women have, in men’s minds, such a low place on the social ladder of this country that it’s useless to define yourself in terms of a woman. What men need is men’s approval.”
- Ask Us! Boatwright Library Is Ready to Help! – A new video from my friends at Boatwright Library encouraging students to ask a librarian for help.
- Parabola – Imagination (Spring 2009)
- “The Heart Eater” – A story from Sierra Leone about a genie who eats the hearts of villagers. Translated from the Mende and retold by Ishmael Beah.
- Milton Among the Philosophers – Chapter One – Mechanical Life: Descartes, Hobbes, and the Implications of Mechanism – A much-needed introduction to the philosophical debates that informed Paradise Lost.
- “Science, or natural philosophy, was only then in the process of separating itself from what we call philosophy.”
- “To the extent that one accepted Epicurean atoms as a metaphysical first principle, one was brought into conflict with orthodox beliefs in the incorporeality of the rational soul, freedom of the will, and Genesis creation.”
