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Since there is so much happening throughout the building, the web committee thought it would be nice to share monthly updates about what we’re doing. This month, there are three big projects on the table: Summon, getting user feedback, and new parts of the website.

As we know, ZSR is adopting Summon. This search interface will be really useful to our users, so we want to contextualize it on the website in a way that introduces and highlights the service and only enhances their web experience. We’ve had discussions about placement, vocabulary, and framing. We look forward to releasing this new search feature and talking with users about their experience so that we can quickly adapt to best meet their needs.

… which is a nice segue to the second big project: getting user feedback. We started focusing on this in the 2010-2011 academic year with a few small-scale surveys and other outreach efforts. This helped us learn how to handle feedback campaigns and what our expectations could be. We look forward to using this information this year as we concentrate on the integration of Summon, our mobile presence, and other parts of the site that we’d like to improve.

The third big project is mobile. Mobile is clearly here to stay… and it is time that we have a mobile site that maximizes the mobile library experience. We’ve not been standing still on this; for the past few years we’ve been monitoring trends and watching how other libraries implement mobile sites. We’ve learned that mobile sites should not be the entire website on a small screen, but rather select aspects of the site that users might want to engage with on their phone. We’ve surveyed users, looked at other mobile library sites, and have begun to create a list of our core features for our mobile site. This is the year to put them into action.

Finally, because the social media world moves so fast, we know it’s time to update our social media plan. We were pleasantly surprised to learn that an ALA presenter said that ZSR was the only library with a strategic plan for social media (rather than guidelines or a policy) that they were able to find and we look forward to building on the successes we’ve had with Twitter (thanks Chris!) this year.

All in all, we’ve got a lot going on and we’re looking forward to a productive year!!

–Kevin & Lauren