What can I say? Starting a new job and moving to a new city hasn’t left much time for blogging. Things have settled a bit at this point, so hopefully I’ll be back here more regularly from this point forward.
Houston, as a city, has been good to us so far. Our apartment complex is very social, and we’ve gotten to know our neighbors as well as reconnecting with some friends from Atlanta that live here now. It’s HOT, no denying that, but we have a pool in our complex and we’re pretty much enjoying the heat.
I’m loving the job. Not too surprising, it’s the job I was looking for all along, but I’m pleased to report that it doesn’t disappoint. I’ve spent most of my time this summer working on our website redesign, and now that that’s wrapping up I’ve got a few exciting projects in the pipeline for the fall.
I’ve also got a lot of travel coming up in the next few months – to Waco this week for training from the Texas Digital Library, to Colorado to visit friends, LITA in Atlanta at the end of September, and (hopefully) Internet Librarian in Monterey in October.
What I’m really excited (and slightly terrified) about is tomorrow – first day of classes. 37,787 students. I’m not sure I can even imagine how things will be with that many more people on campus. But I’m looking forward to it!
I’m interested in your website redesign process. We’re going to be starting a similar project soon (we want to get a discovery layer in place, sort of in parallel), and I am in the data gathering stage. Did you guys rely on studies, or on student surveys, or on focus groups or what? If you were willing to pass along any kinds of materials–what you asked the students, or what studies led you to go with a search box on the front page–I’d be very interested.
I’m going to have to do a whole literature search and user testing and all that, of course, but it looks like you guys have a nice, clean interface, so anything you used to get to that (and justify it to other librarians
) would only help with my own data gathering.
Thanks!
We can talk =) I actually missed the bulk of the planning process, since I started just a couple months before it went live, but I know the basic outline of how everything happened & I’d love to hear more about your project!