As a thought experiment, I was wondering if we could easily get our library homepage up and running on a platform other than LibGuides. On the one hand, this seems like it should be pretty easy, as it’s all HTML/CSS/JS. But nonetheless, I wouldn’t be surprised if there would be some problems lurking in the… Continue reading Could it run somewhere other than libguides?
Category: homepage
Migrating to bootstrap 5
LibGuides seems to have finally begun its long journey to Bootstrap 5. In the abstract, this is really good news. New features! Modern tools! No longer having to worry about Bootstrap 3 being EOL! All good stuff. But in practice, I think this might ultimately mean a lot of work for our library. Our library… Continue reading Migrating to bootstrap 5
Minimum viable website
In my last post I talked about pushing back on the complexity of JavaScript frameworks. Now I’m thinking about taking this further. In the name of maintainability, I think I am going to make an alternate version of our library page: a “minimum viable website”. I’ll strip out as much of the JavaScript as absolutely… Continue reading Minimum viable website
Fall is here
The fall semester is starting this week, so it’s a natural inflection point in the academic year. Our departmental website committee wrapped up our summer weekly meetings last week, committed all the code we’d written over the past few months, and made it live. Things are going to shift dramatically in September. I’ll be spending… Continue reading Fall is here
Revisions
We’ve reached peak summer in New York City, so most everyone is at the beach, and the library is in a state of summer hibernation. The librarians are still in the office of course, and we’ve been working on revisions to the library website. Our goal is to have a revised site live by the… Continue reading Revisions
UX
A few months ago, our campus Communications Department asked us if we wanted feedback on our library webpage. Naturally, we said yes, and then didn’t hear anything for a while. But now the feedback has arrived! It is extensive. I think our Website Committee was a bit shocked at how much feedback we got, and… Continue reading UX
Widgets
Library websites often include widgets of various sorts. Hours widgets, chat widgets, and so on. Often these are built by outside vendors, and plopped into library pages by librarians. The intention, I suppose, is to provide functionality that the librarians may not want build themselves. I have contradictory feelings about widgets. First, the bad things:… Continue reading Widgets
IE
Since the new library website went live a couple weeks ago, I’ve been poking at it, looking for problems. I was assuming there must be some unexpected use cases out there that would cause it fail. I found exactly what I was looking for when one of my co-workers fired up Internet Explorer to do… Continue reading IE
A new library webpage for the new semester
This week our new library webpage went live, just in time for the fall semester. You can see it at https://library.kbcc.cuny.edu. It represents about 8 months of work: 4 months of technical work, followed by 4 months of organizational work. I particularly enjoyed the technical bits, while the subsequent, unavoidable bureaucratic work was not as… Continue reading A new library webpage for the new semester
