Library web site guidelines: SUMMARY

[Eric Rumsey]

Thanks very much to everyone who responded to my question about web design.
Many very good suggestions came in. In a quick look, the first five sites
below look especially useful.

  --Eric

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Eric Rumsey, Hardin Library for the Health Sciences
University of Iowa, Iowa City IA 52242
<eric-rumsey at uiowa.edu>
319-335-9875 (voice), 319-335-9897 (fax)

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Design, design, design, WebHCI
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/webhci/design.html

WWW Help  page, Kevin Werbach
http://werbach.com/web/wwwhelp.html

Web Design for Librarians, Scholarly Communication Center, Rutgers Univ
http://scc01.rutgers.edu/SCCHome/web.htm

All Things Web
http://www.pantos.org/atw/

Book published by ALA -
Building the Service-Based Library Web Site, Sherry Piontek and Kristen
Garlock, librarians with the JSTOR project

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Other sites suggested, in most cases with the name of the person who sent it.

Donna Reed, Multnomah County Library
We have a "toolkit" for people designing County sponsored websites.  It is
at www.multnomah.lib.or.us/cisp/

Mark Stover, UCSB
http://www.library.ucsb.edu/universe/stover.html

[For public libraries]
http://www.tiac.net/users/mpl/guidelines.html

"How to Make Your Web Offerings Useful to the Most
Visitors"
http://www.eff.org/~mech/Scritti/html.tipsheet

Tom Keene,University of South Florida
You might like to go to a collection of pages dealing with design issues
that I link to on my Web Design & Management class page.  Its at
http://luna.cas.usf.edu/~keene/demo.html and the particular link is called
"Design, Design, Design."

Heather Adams, Librarian/Clearinghouse Officer, Auckland Institute of Technology
-There are two checklists giving criteria for web pages. The first is
for an information web page at:
http://www.science.widener.edu/~withers/inform.htm
-There is a list of evaluation techniques given at:
http://www.science.widener.edu/~withers/evalout.htm
which I have found useful for judging existing web pages.
-An other source of information is a paper called Thinking critically
about World Wide Web resources which can be found at:
http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/instruct/critical.html

Mike Mitchell, Technical Services Librarian, System Administrator,
Dittlinger Memorial Library, New Braunfels, TX 78130
http://lonestar.texas.net/~mitchmd/htmlfun.htm

Michelle Rago
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html
http://cast.stanford.edu/cast/www/donts.html

Kevin Brewer, Utah State University
We recently developed web guidelines for the libraries here at Utah
State University and I found the following sites particularly useful:
http://www.ed.gov/internal/wwwstds/index.html
http://www.library.wisc.edu/help/tech/Web_standards.html
or have a look at the tentative guidelines we've set up for our
library home page:
http://www.usu.edu/~library/Policy/web.html

Anne Costigan, Library Web Site Administrator, University of Bradford
I have a page of discussion about links, which came from the following site;
http://ijhcs.open.ac.uk/shneiderman/shneiderman-11.html
Links are discussed in section 5.4. This material is taken from a
soon-t-be-published book by Ben Shneiderman. Some of it is very
theoretical but the section on links is good, clear and brief. S 5.5, a
paragraph only, is also useful.


Judith Murrray Griffiths, Southwest Regional Library System, Durango, CO
You might want to look at a page we had done for our regional library
retreat in conjunction with a presentation -
www.colosys.net/sagebrush/index.htm.  Also, Carol Oakes, Reference
Librarian, Albertsons Library, Boise State University has a web page that
includes useful information for libraries who want to develop their own
pages - www.idbsu.edu/carol/.

Boyd R. Collins
With regard to web design for librarians, you may also want to take a look
at the Rutgers University Scholarly Communication Center collection, "Web
Design for Librarians" at http://scc01.rutgers.edu/SCCHome/web.htm.  This
is a compilation of resources from several sites and includes a compilation
of excerpts from various guides which attempts to summarize some of the
best advice from the major sources.


>From John Kupersmith, Washoe County Library, Reno NV -

Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton,
The Yale C/AIM Web Style Guide
 http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/index.html
while not specific to libraries, is excellent.  It includes sections
on web interface design, site design, page design, graphics, etc.

Eric H. Schnell,
Writing for the Web: A Primer for Librarians
< http://bones.med.ohio-state.edu/eric/papers/primer/webdocs.html >
includes some basic how-to's and a page on "Design Considerations."

Mark Stover and Steven D. Zink,
"World Wide Web Home Page Design: Patterns and Anomalies
  of Higher Education Library Home Pages,"
Reference Services Review 24 (Fall 1996), 7-18,
discusses hypermedia design issues and evaluates actual library
home pages (entrance pages to sites) according to a set of design
criteria.