Website Project Update 3/1/2019

User Experience Intensive

The UX Intensive, led by Rachel Cox and Jackie Sipes, continues for two more weeks. In the last month, they have worked on a categorization of a large amount of the web content, not just services. They’ve organized the categories into a navigation and subsequent content aggregation pages and then tested these with patrons and library staff. You can read more about their work on the their Confluence page (linked above) and you can view the latest wireframes below. Please note that you will need to log into Confluence to view the page. If you do not yet have a login to Confluence and would like one, please contact me.

Infrastructure Work

The development team of Chad Nelson, Steven Ng and Chris Doyle are working on several components of the underlying infrastructure.

Indexing content into solr

Steven is working on exposing the website content data as JSON so that it can be harvested and indexed into Solr and displayed in Library Search. This is the preliminary work that is required to allow patrons and library staff to search website content alongside books, articles, databases, etc. This unification of all content into a single search is one of the overarching goals of the entire web project.

Publishing options in the backend

As with any Content Management System, there is a backend user interface that allows non-technical staff to compose and publish content to the website. Chad is in the process of adding the ability to track versions of content and create drafts. This will be incredibly helpful for content management and content strategy going forward.

Forms and pages

The current website hosts several forms for various purposes, i.e. the missing book form and the incident report form. These forms need to be replicated in the new website. Chris is working on replicating these forms so that they will continue to be available to the staff and patrons that need them.

Chris is also working on one of the final entity models; Page. The structure for the website is built around entity models, for example: buildings, spaces, people, groups, services, policies, etc. While this covers much of the website content, we have several pages that do not fit into one of these entities. And for these, we created the Page entity. Some examples of ‘pages’ include the Dean’s Welcome, the Diversity & Inclusion statement, the Annual Report and past issues of Speaking Volumes.