"What's New" links

[Kathy Varjabedian]

 >I'm beginning a redesign of our website, and am looking for examples of 
how other libraries notify their patrons about new products and services. I 
would appreciate recommended websites, suggestions, etc.


We have a "news feature" in the center of the library home page
( http://lib-www.lanl.gov/ ) which changes every couple of weeks.  We keep 
this very short so people won't glaze over and the page won't get too busy. 
If they're really interested they can click for more information.

We have a "What's New" page which gives the news feature, new website 
links, the library newsletter, what's new lists for books, e-journals 
etc.  We included a link to this in the nav bar that shows on every page in 
the site, hoping to catch users who have their favorite page bookmarked and 
rarely go to the home page.

We have a monthly newsletter on the website, which has a e-mail list to 
notify users of new issues.

The weekly new books/ebooks web pages are generated automatically; a file 
is extracted from the online catalog and run through some scripts.  This 
also has an e-mail version.

I dream of subject-specific email notices, so that, for instance, a chemist 
could get just the new chemistry books, journals, databases, web resources 
in one message.  Right now we don't have the infrastructure ready to do 
this in an automated fashion, but are working on it.   Our users generally 
say they don't have time to wade through a lot of material and want 
targeted information.

We've found that it's best to take several approaches.  Users differ in how 
they prefer to get information and you reach more people that way.  You 
might want to do a quick survey of your users first.

Kathy

***************************************************
Kathryn Varjabedian
Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library
Los Alamos, NM
kv at lanl.gov