The Libraries of The Claremont Colleges have a new web site: http://libraries.claremont.edu.

The product of an 18-month evaluation and redesign process, the new site

• reorganizes existing content to make finding things easier;
• enhances navigation to help you have a better sense of where you are in the site;
• provides reader-friendly page layout and options;
• adds many new features, including database-driven electronic journal and database-by-title lists, a "print this page" feature, and the ability to search our online catalog, Blais, directly from the home page of our web site.

Reorganized content

Content is now organized in six major sections: eResearch Tools, Hours & Locations, Need Help?, Getting Materials, Services & Policies, and About the Libraries.

• eResearch Tools is where you will find resources that faculty and students will use to do research, with an emphasis on electronically available resources (hence the e at the head of the name), particularly web-based resources.
• Hours & Locations is where you find information about our individual libraries and service points, what hours they are open, and directions for visitors coming to Claremont; of particular interest in this section are links to our major web sub-sites, including those for Special Collections, Asian Studies and the individual libraries.
• Need Help?, our online help section, puts you into contact with librarians online, via phone and email, and provides tips for doing research, guides for specific courses, and a listing of workshops and classes we offer.
• Getting Materials is the web gateway for getting the research materials you need, whether books and other materials from our collections, course reserves (both paper and electronic), electronic books, or — if we don't have what you need — how to request what you need via interlibrary loan.
• Services & Policies details the services the Libraries provide, including reference and instruction services, the ways we provide access to our resources (both on site and via the web), as well as the services provides by The Copy Center; also here are all the policies users should know.
• About the Libraries presents what is going on at the libraries (lectures, exhibits, and events), contact information for librarians and other staff, job opportunities at the Libraries, as well as our publications, mission statement and goals, and other information about the Libraries, our partners, and affiliations.

Enhanced navigation

The site now provides enhanced navigation features that are designed to help you better orient yourself within the site and find what you need faster than ever before. Each page (beyond the home page) of the Libraries' web site has a menu with tabs for each of the major sections as well as the local menu for the section where you are. The tab and menu for the local section will be color coded to match the look of that section — each section has its own color scheme to help contribute to that section's "sense of place" — and the inactive section tabs are shown in a lighter shade to distinguish them from the active one.

Just below a page's main menu is a bar — the "breadcrumb" bar — that shows you where you are within the site's hierarchy. At the head of this is a link to the home page, followed by the section title and, where needed, the linked titles of any sub-sections that lie between the current page and its parent section. Using this bar you can jump in the hierarchy back to the home page or any page in between.

As an added feature, many pages have a right-hand "Also see" menu that points out other items of interest related to the content of the current page. "Also see" menus give you short cuts to other parts of the site without always having to find them via the site structure.

Finally, where a sub-section of the site has its own organizational requirements in addition to the main navigation, a left-hand sub-menu will be provided when it will save you clicks back to the section menu.

Reader-friendly page layout

Though the new site menu takes up a bit more screen space than the old we have tried to keep it to a minimum to leave as much screen space as possible available for page content. Also:

• text now fills most of the width of a page to minimize scrolling (the old site kept text within a 550-pixel center-aligned table);
• side menus are used only when they enhance navigation;
• all page tables use relative widths, again to maximize the content area;
• almost all text also uses relative sizing — if text is too small for you to read, you can now use your browser's options to increase its size;
• in our database-by-title lists, each database is now accompanied by only a short one or two-sentence description — limiting the amount of scrolling required to reach the bottom of a page since each database entry now takes up less space — with a "more info…" link for each database in case you need additional details about one.

New features

More and more parts of our site are becoming database-driven. What this means for you, the user, is more consistency and accuracy of information. When the information about a resource changes we can now input this data into a back-end database and all pages drawing on this database will reflect such changes.

Our "print this page" feature creates on the fly a printer-friendly version (i.e. without menus or other extraneous page formatting) of any page on our site. And as mentioned before you can now search Blais, our online catalog, directly via a search box on our home page.

More features are in the works. Currently only the alphabetical lists of databases and the lists of e-journals draw on back-end databases, but eventually the subject lists of databases will, too, as well other resources that utilize information about our databases and e-journals (e.g. research guides and course-specific help). Soon these areas also will be searchable to provide even faster access.

A "my library" portal option is also planned and, when ready, will allow you to customize your access to our site.

So, as you can see, our site may be redesigned but there still are many things that are coming that will further enhance the site and your experience of it. Please let us know what you think of the redesign and how we can improve it further.

James Otto
Web Administrator
james.otto@libraries.claremont.edu