Category: Resource

Site icons

iconsI just made a whole bunch of new icons for our website using the Flat Design Icon sets #1 and #2 from Pixeden. They’re free, royalty-free, and attribution-optional. Each set of 16 icons (including more than the library-oriented ones above) comes bundled in a PSD, so you can change the colors to suit your site. In our case, blue blue, blue. Inspiration? The Flat Design look popularized by Microsoft and Google. 

See them in action on our Resources for Students and Ask us pages.

PS. The phone and person were traced from various wingdings, which is why they’re not quite so nice-looking, but I assigned the same Layer Style to them so they’d match

Library website usability testing: sample scripts

If you haven’t done a usability test on your library’s online services in the last 12 months, you’re overdue! Web trends and user expectations change at a fast rate, as do the many parts of a library’s resource ecosystem. Before rolling out the new Lloyd Sealy Library website in December, I conducted a usability test on the beta version of the site in November. The feedback from students and faculty was helpful in refining parts of the site that weren’t as usable — in areas that were already of concern to us and in places we didn’t know were problematic.

There are a bundle of resources out there for usability testing, but not many example scripts specifically for library websites. Below are the scripts I used for students and faculty. Note that this is tailored to John Jay College’s Lloyd Sealy Library website, so some tasks might not be phrased the same way or even performed on your site. At the bottom of this post, I’ve included some notes about this usability study and my approach.

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Notes from recent un/conferences

I’ve attended a handful of great conferences so far this winter. I love sharing, and while reading someone else’s conference notes isn’t the most thrilling activity, perhaps you will find something useful.

  • METRO Annual Conference at Baruch College
    • highlight: digital collections projects
  • Future Perfect: Emerging Tech in Libraries, virtual conference from NISO
    • highlights: possible futures for libraries; 3D printing + IP rights in libraries
  • THATcamp Libraries in Boston
    • highlights: tools for digital collections projects; libraries + MOOCs
  • Research Data Symposium at Columbia University
    • highlights: supporting data management at your institution, start to finish
  • Theorizing the Web at CUNY Graduate Center
    • highlights: New Aesthetic, MOOCs, bots