I have been thinking a great deal about our Library website.  While we didn’t have an official celebration to mark the site’s first year anniversary, this doesn’t distract from the impact the new site has had and continues to have, on our user community.

Let’s journey back to December 2012 for a moment when a “sneak peek” announcement was posted on our blog. Our goal at that time was to deliver an aesthetically pleasing and easier to navigate site.  We understood from our user community that a transition period would be important so our marketing plan included running both sites for a fixed period of time, providing opportunities for our users to trial the new site and ask us questions concerning the new layout and search functionality.  This also proved to be a good opportunity to receive additional feedback. On Thursday, Jan 31, 2013, we transitioned to the new site and we have not looked back since. 

We capitalized on Web 3.0 ideals and offered our user community a mobile experience, the ability to access our site on their mobile device.  We also leveraged our search and discovery tool (Summon) to personalize and deliver real-time results.  Now using the MSKsearch tab, the user will be presented with a list of results based on content format relevant to their search term(s).

We certainly have come a long way – Web 1.0 was all about the user connecting to the web through various user interfaces and Web 2.0 mainly focused on the interactions and collaborations via social media.  Web 3.0 will continue to revolve around the user’s or consumer’s needs and as information professionals and savvy librarians, we are well equipped to continue to develop and deliver a website that addresses our users’ information requirements.

Our focus moving forward will center on improving our portal for discovering quality information and support services, aggregate the best paid and open source content, listen to our users to build on the current site, and promote the Library website as the primary option for MSK staff to conduct their research.

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services