Val's post made me think of this:

http://xkcd.com/773/

"Campus Photo Slideshow" anyone? :D

Nina

On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 11:05 AM, Valerie Forrestal
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I've never heard of an entire library site being buried behind an
> authentication portal. That's just crazy to me. (If you use universal
> authentication, I'm sure it's nice that once students have signed in,
> they can access/use all the services, but sometimes people want to look
> something up quickly, like hours or just check to see if you have a book.)
>
> At my old university, we were demoted from a top-level link to a
> drop-down link (originally under "Student Services" and then moved to
> "Research".) That school used two different CMS's for the administrative
> sites (CommonSpot) and the academic sites (Typo3). Since I left, they've
> united all the sites in Drupal.
>
> At my current institution, the library is listed in a "quick links" drop
> down in the top right corner of the homepage, which is pretty visible,
> and also on the "Academics and Research" page, which is a top-level link
> on the homepage.
>
> Here, every department is responsible for their own website, so we
> recently built our site in WordPress (the school uses Drupal.)
>
> While I was severely annoyed at my old job when we got dropped from a
> top-level to secondary navigation link, I think it's appropriate to list
> the library under either "Academics" or "Research". "Student Services" I
> think is less intuitive, as students often think of the library as a
> place or a list of resources, and not a service, but that's just my opinion.
>
> I also agree with those that said the library should have it's own
> template or CMS. University sites are often driven by admissions, and
> focus on visual and multimedia content (how many university sites
> feature a giant carousel of campus shots? Ugh.) The library, on the
> other hand, should be able to focus on resources, and while displaying
> images from digital collections can be nice, using up that much prime
> real estate for something with so little function is usually not the
> best practice (often that prime spot is used for some sort of tabbed
> search box.)
>
> I've been working with academic library websites for 8 years now, so I
> figured I'd just weigh in with my 2 cents ;)
>
> Happy holidays!
>
> ~val
>
> Valerie Forrestal
> Web Services Librarian/Asst. Professor
> City University of New York
> College of Staten Island Library
> 2800 Victory Blvd., 1L-109I
> Staten Island, N.Y. 10314
> Phone: 718.982.4023
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
>> Matthew Sherman
>> Sent: Tuesday, December 17, 2013 8:41 AM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: [CODE4LIB] Academic Library Website Question
>>
>> Hi Code4Libbers,
>>
>> Slightly odd question for you academic library folks.  Why does your
>> library have its website where it is on the university site?  For context,
>> the library I currently work at has our library site hidden within the
>> campus intranet/portal, so that students have to log into a web portal to
>> even see the search page.  This was a decision by the previous director who
>> was here before my time and an assortment of us librarians think this is a
>> terrible setup.  So I wanted to kick out to the greater community to give us
>> good reasons for free to the website to more general access, or help us to
>> understand why you would bury it behind a login like they did.  All
>> thoughts, insights, and opinions are welcome, they all help us develop our
>> thinking on this and our arguments for any changes we want to make.  Thanks
>> everyone and have a good week.
>>
>> Matt Sherman
>
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> The Campaign for CSI: For College and
> Community<http://www.csi.cuny.edu/foundation/>



-- 
Nina McHale
@ninermac
Developer, Aten Design Group
atendesigngroup.com