University Libraries Unveils New Website

It’s a crisp new look that is already mak­ing a big dif­fer­ence to stu­dents look­ing for infor­ma­tion at Uni­ver­sity Libraries. The new web­site is the cul­mi­na­tion of a two year effort by a com­mit­tee and web team that exam­ined other library web­sites, care­fully reviewed all pages on the old site, and put together focus groups so they could under­stand how stu­dents and fac­ulty use the library web­site and how to make it better.

Holly Phillips, an admin­is­tra­tor in the Dean’s office led the effort and is still work­ing on final tweaks as the web­site went live this morning. It can be found at http://library.unm.edu.  Phillips says they did focus groups to test the usabil­ity of the old site.  “We asked peo­ple to find their sub­ject spe­cial­ist or some­thing and watched them in giant frus­tra­tion try­ing to fig­ure it out.”  They did the same user test­ing with the new site and it prompted even more changes.

The new site incor­po­rates sug­ges­tions from fac­ulty and stu­dents who tried the beta site, and they are still inter­ested in what users have to say about the new site.  One sec­tion of the front page asks for your feedback.

It should also be much eas­ier to fig­ure out what hours the four libraries on cam­pus are open, who might be able to help you with your spe­cific research ques­tion, and to live chat with a librar­ian if you can’t find an answer to your ques­tion on the new site.

Although they had hoped to get pro­fes­sional assis­tance in reor­ga­niz­ing the library web­site, bud­get con­straints made that impos­si­ble so staff and fac­ulty mem­bers at the library tack­led this in addi­tion to their reg­u­lar duties.  Mem­bers of the web team included Zoe Chao, Chris­tine Sraha, Amy Jack­son, Lore Townsend and Brian Freels-Stendel.

Most of the thou­sands of users at UNM Libraries access the jour­nals, books and research mate­ri­als online, but under­grad­u­ate stu­dents in par­tic­u­lar spend a lot of time in the cam­pus libraries.  “They will bring their lap­tops and food and just move in to the group study rooms,” says Phillips.  Much of the course­work involves team activ­i­ties and the link that reserves study room space is one of the most used on the entire website.

Phillips says this is phase I on the web­site revamp. The web team has plans for sev­eral more changes to make the site eas­ier to use and more informative. For exam­ple they will work with the library fac­ulty mem­bers to set up indi­vid­ual web pages explain­ing their area of exper­tise and ways they can assist stu­dents or fac­ulty in research­ing par­tic­u­lar topics.

Uni­ver­sity Libraries used the new web con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem being imple­mented by Uni­ver­sity Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and Mar­ket­ing (UCAM).

Media con­tact: Karen Went­worth (505) 277‑5627; email: kwent2@unm.edu