Posts tagged with Library Website in Blog Library Tech Talk

Search is the cornerstone of the library website, and the primary goal of our online presence: to help users find resources and information so that they can do their work.

The University of Michigan Library is working hard to improve the accessibility of all our websites. This brings up a simple question: what does it mean to make a website accessible?

Does adding links to popular databases change user searching behavior? An October 2013 change to the University of Michigan Library’s front page gave us the opportunity to conduct an empirical study and shows that user behavior has changed since the new front page design was launched.

How much do people actually read on the web? Not much. UX Myths presents the evidence.

More than 15% of user searches for the seven most commonly used databases on the University of Michigan Library’s website were misspellings of the database name. We looked through our search logs for the three months spanning January 1-April 2, 2014, to find correct and likely incorrect search queries.

Looking back, there are a few lessons that most resonated over the course of my first year as the library's web content strategist.

The library recently completed a successful, six-month pilot program for a new model of web content oversight. Each division appointed a web content coordinator to represent them, and together the coordinators work in library-wide issues.

The University Library has a new blogging platform to which most U-M Library blogs will gradually move over the coming months. The new blogging platform (on which this post was published!) is built in Drupal with an accessible, responsive design. It is designed to bring together the library’s many blogs into one convenient location.

A look at how the U-M Library website's search boxes were used during the Fall 2012 semester.

Over the past months, a team of library staff comprising the MLibrary Favorites Working Group (Albert Bertram, Sigrid Cordell, Jonathan Rothman, Sonu Mishra, and Ken Varnum), together with Bill Dueber from Library Systems, have been working on an improved Favorites tool for the library web site.