Assignment+2

I looked at the websites of several nearby undergraduate institutions in order to determine what I would want to include on my own library website. These included the [|Purchase College Library], the [|the Esther Rauschenbbush Library at Sarah Lawrence College], and the [|Manhattanville Library]. I was in the unique position of also being able to consider an earlier iteration of the Purchase College Library, having used it frequently before the significant revisions which its current face displays.

I decided, ultimately, that I was most fond of the newer incarnation of the Purchase College Library (PCL) and the Manhattanville Library websites. Both sites prominently emphasize access to the collection by displaying a basic search bar on the main page, but they both have dramatically different designs. Where the PCL seems utilitarian and professional, the Manhattanville site is stylish and combines more daring aesthetics with functionality. Ironic, given Purchase's reputation as a school for the arts.

My tools a bit limited to what the site creation tools available to me-- Weebly, in this case --will allow me to do, I modeled my site for the most part on the PCL's more plain, utilitarian appearance, but incorporated the horizontal layout of the Manhattanville site. While the typical inclination of a website user is to scan vertically rather than horizontally, and to find a need for horizontal scrolling distasteful, it is also desirable to avoid the need to scroll altogether, at least on the main page of a site. One wants their visitor to be able to find all the information they need without scrolling up and down, putting everything on the screen before them. As a consequence, I found that the horizontal design maximized the ability of the site designer to place content without running out of space. The narrow sidebars of the PCL site force much of the content down below the vertical limits of the viewport of the average monitor, while the Manhttanville site nicely encapsulates everything in its layout.

Thence comes the [|Miskatonic University Library website], a reference to the works of author Howard Phillips Lovecraft. While I did not place the searching tools on the main page, I made an effort to make the link to them prominent and highly visible on the menu bar at the top of the page, as well as a link to the hours of my fictional college library. Hours vary as a matter of necessity: the works of Lovecraft and his imitators and contemporaries who shared his fictional universe showed the library staff of Miskatonic frequently leaving the campus for scholarly excursions or strange adventures, and I imagine that this leaves the library far too understaffed to offer broader hours than I presented. Most of the other tools-- the catalog, database, Refworks, "Ask a Librarian" and ILL pages --are simply cribbed from the coding of the PCL and Manhattanville sites, a matter intended both to save time and to add an illusion of professional coding that my current skills do not actually allow.