The Ohio State University

We are so excited! We are migrating to a brand new website for the OSU Libraries, and its going to be great! We’ve heard from our content providers, our patrons and from the maintainers: They wanted a better way to get their information onto the site, a better way to find it and a better way to organize it. We have spent a lot of time and energy creating a new website that addresses these needs, and while we were at it, gave it a new, more modern look that will help visitors use the information in a friendly and consistent manner.

We’ve been keeping the visitors in mind and involved through the entire process. We’ve based our navigation on data we collected, our design on good readability principles and our architecture with finding and learning as the core goals. Usability testing already made the navigation easier and the architecture more streamlined - and we still have more testing planned to make sure we are meeting the needs of our visitors.

The technology that we’ve implemented, a Content Management System (CMS) called SilverStripe will allow us to make changes easily and efficiently - no more handing off to the ‘web person’. We can all do it ourselves, letting us make more frequent updates so you get the most accurate and up-to-date information that we can produce.

The architecture will help us communicate the things that we think that we do very well. Some of them you know about and use, some of them we haven’t done a good job of sharing. The way we’ve arranged our information, we hope that you’ll find other services and materials that will be helpful in your search for great information.

So, look for new pages (you’ll recognize them when you see them!), and please let us know what you think. You can get a start on using the website here. And finally, keep an eye on the Library Labs blog, which will feature different aspects of the website with a little more detail in the coming weeks.