Library to debut new website in near future

The library will be getting a facelift in the near future.
The library will be getting a facelift in the near future.

Duke librarians are hopeful that the new library website will be released in the near future after two failed roll outs.

After using the same web infrastructure for over seven years, the Duke library system is moving to an all-new website that is designed to give students and researchers easier access to commonly used resources. The website was first supposed to roll out over fall break, but technical issues forced its debut to be postponed. The second planned roll out in late October was also pushed back due to similar issues.

“We had done extensive testing before we launched the site over fall break,” said Emily Daly, head of the libraries’ user experience department. “But even that testing didn’t indicate the problems we would have until we actually flipped the switch.”

During the final stages of the site’s testing phase, users were unable to log in to their accounts. They encountered this problem during both of the planned website launches.

Daly added that the website worked better in the testing phase than when it was live.

Currently, there is no timeline as to when another roll out will be attempted, said Thomas Crichlow, the libraries’ user experience project manager. The library does aim to have a timeline within the next few days and is looking forward to rolling out the site soon.

The website will be redesigned to make commonly used features more accessible. The masthead at the top of the page will be constant across most of the site’s webpages, allowing users to quickly access pages from any location. There will also be “quick links” to popular resources such as citation tools and library room reservations.

“It’s really about making it easier, making our content easier for researchers to engage with,” Daly said.

The new website also aim to improve the overall online research experience. The default search option on the library homepage will be “catalog” instead of “all,” Crichlow said. This means that users will see a narrower selection of results by default, which Crichlow hopes will reduce the information overload that sometimes happens with the current search results page.

“Library websites are not like regular websites,” said Aaron Welborn, director of communications at Duke libraries. “In addition to being our virtual presence, it’s also a tool—It’s the primary way people get to our stuff, so we wanted to make sure it was designed in a very useful way.”

Crichlow explained that the site currently has many duplicate or out-of-date pages that are not managed by any person or department. The new site will eliminate these pages and ensure that a specific person or group is responsible for each page.

The developers of the new website got input from undergraduates, graduates and faculty during the website redesign.

“We started out with extensive research of how our patrons use the current site both by looking at data that we have through Google analytics and by looking at search terms that people have used on the current site,” Crichlow said.

The website team found that many users could not find features that were important or commonly used. These findings drove much of the site design and development process, Crichlow explained.

Welborn added that the redesign has taken about a year to complete.

“It has been a long, involved process,” he said.

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