Library Web Ecology: What you need to know as a Web Design Coordinator

Citation

Abbott, S. (2010), "Library Web Ecology: What you need to know as a Web Design Coordinator", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 179-180. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330331011039571

As its purpose, this book seeks to guide web co‐ordinators and their team in the role of managing the creation, evolution and maintenance of a successful library website. It does appeal to a wide variety of interested readers as it seeks to offer alternative possibilities from building a library website from scratch, through a radical redesign or at least to try on a smaller scale to redefine your current website to better support your users “[…] if you can find a way to implement parts of this book within your current design in order to achieve […] usability consider yourself successful”, so one of the book's major strengths is to allow you to take away only the information you want according to your need.

The text does suffer from a US bias but as the author is based there this is not surprising, there are also a lot of virtual world examples and Internet‐based further reading raising the concern of how quickly these sources will become obsolete or unavailable, but currently they offer pertinent and useful examples.

The book is divided into five parts with an opening and conclusion to sandwich in the stages of website creation. There is a logical progression beginning with a chapter discussing the establishment of the role of the web co‐ordinator and the team who will be responsible for the planning and creation of the website or its redesign and then the important process of winning over the remaining staff and any resistance to change. The author considers this establishing a “library culture”.

Next it moves into examining the purpose behind having a web site in the first place. This does raise another area of concern, which is the expected need for resources available to the web coordinator, in particular the time that is available to them. The reality in a busy academic library is often that this redesign or creation task will be divided between roles, meaning it has to be slotted into an already busy schedule, or designated to someone in an IT team with no library background and a heavy workload based elsewhere. However the author talks about the web co‐ordinator having authority and time to carry out the necessary tasks.

In her favour she balances this with an emphasis on the need for the web co‐ordinator to be backed by a team of library staff at every stage to ensure the direction of the web design, but this does not necessarily weigh up against the reality of library work. This is brought out particularly in this second chapter which talks about developing the aforementioned “library culture” or in other words a website which fits “into an articulate set of goals”. The suggestion is that this should be done by planning, surveying your users, creating a vision, assessing, modifying, conducting a website inventory, documenting all stages of this planning process, developing a mission and then a strategic plan with a timeline, goals, budget, objectives, assessments at all stages and reporting features at the end. In reality this is an ideal of what could occur if an institution were to fully support this planning stage, but it is interesting that there are only online US examples of such plans and none from a more overstretched and under‐budgeted UK academic scene.

Moving into the third chapter there is some good practical advice about branding your website through “establishing a website identity”. There are sections on how users can access the website and decisions about logos, fonts and other functional data all of which seek to offer some good guidance on how to achieve this. This useful chapter is followed by another on sustaining your web site once it is up and running in its new format. Again sections offer good advice on establishing standards and running maintenance checks. Here we are offered a list of “quick website tune‐ups” that anyone can do to perk up their website without the need for a redesign.

It is these sections which are the high points of the book due simply to their usefulness and the author maintains this with the last chapter under the auspices of “the living web”, which talks about incorporating newer technologies into a website. Again this section could fall prey to being superseded quickly with newer innovations, but presently it offers a comprehensive look at Web 2.0 technology on offer and gives good advice about considering their uptake “Does the library REALLY need this tool?”

In conclusion this book offers practical solutions to looking at your website and would be very useful as a preparation for your own library web project.