We’re making a few changes to the home page of our library catalogue in time for the new academic year. Changes include:
- Reduced ‘tabset’ browsing to only the most important elements of the catalogue.
- Use of the newest version of the University’s Minerva logo and colour scheme.
- Home page used for ‘top 10′ (…ish) links to Library services elsewhere on the web – these are served up using an RSS feed via Feed2JS (so that we can display the same links in other environments such as Blackboard). All placed in one of HiP’s lovely XSL stylesheets.
Very many thanks to the new LNCD intern Jamie Mahoney for help with styling this!
Here’s the current, ‘old’ front page:
And here’s the new, redesigned page – still in development!
You can have a look at it, if you like, at:
This isn’t intended as a long-term solution for the question of the Library’s web presence. There’s a lot more we need to do to consolidate and simplify the information we present to users across different environments (open web, intranet/Portal, Blackboard VLE, etc.). But it’s a good short-to-medium-term fix which makes the most of the tools we have available at the moment, and recognises the value of establishing www.library.lincoln.ac.uk as the home of our ‘primary’ presence on the web. If nowt else, that’s the address we’re printing on our induction materials 
We also had to work out a way of testing this on one of our public-access OPAC kiosks. I was particularly proud of this little MARC hack which allowed us to navigate to the test version of the home page without having to use the browser navigation bar (which is disabled on the kiosks).
