Web Work Notes

I’ve been working on updating the library’s website this summer. Recently, I completed some new designs for important pages I want to share with you. Our landing pages direct users to the content they need to reach their goals. And our location pages help our users know where to find study space, collections, and more.

At least that’s how these pages should work. Ours are not great, and it is time to update them to make them more useful.

Here is the landing page for the first new navigation category: Find, Borrow, Request.

It directs to collections and materials, as well as information about libary accounts. The other landing pages will have similar layouts, and should be ready to preview by next week.

Location pages have not served our users for a long time. The new location pages highlight the services, spaces, and collections of each space. We also share restroom location, including gender-neutral locations, nursing stations, and more. The new study space section will show off the variety of quiet and collaborative spaces we have.

Here is the new Steelcase Library location page. I’m updating other locations as I take new photos.

One new feature of these pages is Breadcrumbs - these are links and visual cues to the website’s structure. I have to add these by hand but by the start of Fall semester, they should be throughout the site.

Next week I will have landing pages complete and progress on other locations. The first full week of August I will begin some new content pages for study spaces and computer labs. As always, I will keep you updated here!

Last week, I told you that I am reorganizing the library website. I shared new top-level categories that reflect changes to our services and to how folks use the Web. They are:

• Find, Borrow, Request
• Teaching & Scholarship
• Visit, Study, Learn
• About Us

Today I want to share how I will organize our website content in these categories.

Find, Borrow, Request

The first section has links to Find Materials:

• Books in various formats
• Databases, Journals, Articles, Videos, and Data
• Special Collections, Rare Books, and University Archives
• GVSU-authored materials (ScholarWorks@GVSU)
• Curriculum Materials

I am also adding new links for finding Course Reserves and browsing by call number. The second section has pages on Borrowing and Requesting items:

• Document Delivery and MeLCat
• Borrowing Privileges and Policies
• Renew Books
• Borrow Laptops, chargers, and study aids
• Borrow eBooks through Overdrive

Teaching and Scholarship

Ten years ago our content on teaching moved to an “Instructional Services” website. That site is gone, and it’s time to bring that focus back to the library website. The first section will offer Help with Scholarship:

• Subject and Course Guides (LibGuides)
• Librarians by Subject, Knowledge Market, and 1-on-1 research consultations
• Citation Tools and the Resource Market
• Open Access and Publication Services
• Document Delivery*
• ScholarWorks submissions (including theses and projects)

We will also highlight Instruction and Course Support:

• First Year Writing and Online/Hybrid Support
• Teaching and Classroom support, SCUA instruction, request instruction
• Knowledge Market services for faculty
• Student Learning Outcomes
• Course Reserves*

Last, we will have a section on Copyright Resources. (Matt Ruen and I will work on updating these pages in Fall 2024):

Visit, Study, Learn

We see a need to highlight the physical spaces and in-person offerings at the library. The first highlight here will be the Knowledge Market. We will then have a new section on Study Spaces that will include:

• Group Study Rooms
• The Study Space Quiz
• New sections on different types of study spaces in library spaces

We will then have a redesigned section on our Locations. The current location pages focus on marketing the locations. Amy and I will design the new pages with a visitor focus. Stace, Amy, and I have also been working on new content for Events and Exhibits:

• Events at the library, hosting an event, policies
• Pop-up exhibits (coming soon), and SCUA exhibits
• Tours and Filming in the library

I am adding a new section on Computing:

• Borrowing laptops and chargers*
• Computer labs in library locations and software
• Printing and Scanning (Including 3D printing)
• Guest computer access

Last, I will add Create and Design:

• Digital Creator Lab
• Tech Showcase
• Curriculum Materials Equipment

About Us

This final section will continue to hold information about the library. The first section will be About the Libraries:

• Mission, Vision, Values, Goals, etc.
• IDEA and Territorial Acknowledgement
• Collections Strategy and other strategy documents

We will continue to link to the Staff Directory. The Off The Shelf site is now the Library News section, which will share a wide variety of library stories. A new section called Work for Us will:

• Highlight our student, staff, and faculty jobs
• Advertise fellowships, practicums, and internships

We will continue to encourage our users to Give to the Library through funds and donations. We will collect our public-facing Policies and Faculty Governance materials into groups. Finally, a new section of links For Staff provides easy access to internal staff websites.

I will also simplify a few web pages and sites. The four Curriculum Materials Library pages will merge together into one page. The Scholarly Communications website will move into the main library website.

The new navigation will go live the week of August 12th. The help, My Account, and chat links will be part of a new toolbar. I will share mock ups of new landing pages by early next week. Please reach out with any feedback!

Footnote *: Some items will be in more than one place in the navigation. That is okay!

It’s been almost 10 years since we reorganized how the content of the library website. A lot has changed in that time—the systems we use, the services we offer, and how users browse the web. This summer I’ll be working on the site’s “Information Architecture.” I’ll be changing the categories we use to navigate the site, and moving pages to where they make the most sense.

Currently we have four (4) categories of content:

• Find Materials
• Services
• About Us
• Help

There are two (2) more top-level links in the navigation, too: “My Account” and “Ask a Question.” More on those in a bit.

I observed how users search and browsethe website and wrote new categories based on our library goals. I also checked out how our peer libraries had organized their websites. Since the pandemic, there has been a lot of renewed interest in our spaces. I also want to highlight the work we do to support the teaching and research at the University. And while the category names are longer than they are now, they reflect our users’ words, not our jargon. Our new categories will be:

• Find, Borrow, Request
• Visit, Study, Learn
• Teaching and Scholarship
• About Us

The links to the My Account page and Ask a Question will move up to the header of the site. This is because both of these links are tools, not categories of pages. The Ask link will take folks to all the various ways to get help. (We are still working on the label.) The header will also get a direct link to our Chat service. I’ll share more about how the header will be changing as the summer goes on.

Keep tuned for future posts on what content will go in what category! My target dates for the new organization is for August, after Summer semester but before the Fall.

Leading up to the Fall semester, we installed sensors that help us track the real-time occupancy of the Mary Idema Pew and Steelcase Libraries. The included software was designed to serve as a note to prospective visitors at an entrance as to whether they were allowed to enter or not, which doesn’t necessarily serve our purposes. A few weeks ago I built a little data collector and then started displaying real-time occupancy on the library homepage and a stand-alone page on the CMS.

Last week, after reading Sarah’s Friday update about how she had visited the page a few times to get a sense of the buildings’ occupancy, I thought it might be useful to record that data for future decision-making and also to display a bit more of the occupancy data to our users. Knowing what the occupancy is right now is useful if you are coming to the library in a few minutes, but what if you want to know the best time to come when there aren’t so many people in the building?

For those interested in the technical side, I’m running a script on the server at 15 minutes after the hour every hour (occupancy tends to dip on the hour, because of the class schedule - folks leave for class 5 before the hour and folks who are coming from class don’t get here until between 5-10 after). That data is simply saved in a CSV file, which is parsed by the visualization scripts for each library. Those scripts look at the last 24 entries, and display them in a simple chart using ChartJS.

Since the Fall semester started, we’ve had significantly more traffic directly to our hours page (mostly from searches of “gvsu library hours”). Since today’s hours are on our every other web page across all our sites, we didn’t have as much traffic to the main hours page before, because the current hours were obvious and our previous research had shown that mot students were looking at hours for the current day. Well, now that many classes are online or hybrid, more students are looking ahead to plan our their weeks (or, at least that’s my working theory). Hence the increase in visits to our hours page.

Yesterday when I was working the desk shift at Mary I, I was looking at the hours page, and it took me a second to figure out which column I should be looking at. And so, this morning I made a quick change to the styles on our weekly hours page to make it easier to see the hours across our locations for today. It might take a refresh or a cache clear before you see it.

This weekend, GVSU released a virtual assistant app called myBlueLaker created by the start up n-powered, that allows users to type or speak questions about GVSU to get them information about their University presence (grades, registration information, etc.) as well as logistics (building hours, calendar, etc.) all in one place. I downloaded it this morning so I could make sure all the library related stuff was accurate.

Wait - let’s take a closer look at something:

Yes, there it is. Another virtual assistant that is gendered as a woman. (And no, you can’t change it to a man or a gender fluid avatar or even Bender from Futurama.)

It’s almost like they updated the icon for the sexist web app that Don Draper might have created, “I Want Sandy,” which shut down in 2008.

Here I’m simply going to address the fact that they chose to make an avatar gendered as a woman to be a tool that helps you with mundane tasks. I’m not even going to get into what they are communicating with the little finger pose the avatar is doing on her face, or the face that “she” is a young white woman—I leave that to someone else.

There has been a lot of scholarship written about how using female gendered AI assistants reinforces negative gender stereotypes, but this also isn’t a new topic in the popular press. (I assume my IT department is not reading scholarship on technology and ethics, even if they should. They are understaffed and too busy, especially these days.) Last year, the U.N. even released a report declaring this gendering of assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana as a real problem, but the big companies didn’t say much in response. (They were too busy swimming in piles of gold, like Scrooge McDuck.)

The gender we assign to a chat bot, a email account, or any non-gendered thing affects how we interact with it. Recently on Twitter, the writer Bess Kalb explained how this gender bias plays out in daily life by sharing a story about her friend: “A friend’s male assistant is a fake email account she runs because people called her “difficult” and “impossible” for having small windows of availability until ‘he’ started running interference and then people just accepted she was … busy.”

In looking at virtual assistants, Loidean and Adams succinctly use Mireille Hildebrandt’s critique of technology on gendered AI assistants, noting “that the technologies we use not only reflect and embed our presumptions and social biases, but also reproduce them in new ways that have material effects on us”¹. Writing in PC Mag, Chandra Steele emphasizes that this reflecting our of own biases is why our virtual assistants are women: “Though they lack bodies, they embody what we think of when we picture a personal assistant: a competent, efficient, and reliable woman. She gets you to meetings on time with reminders and directions, serves up reading material for the commute, and delivers relevant information on the way, like weather and traffic. Nevertheless, she is not in charge”². GVSU’s female avatar for its myBlueLaker assistant continues to reinforce this stereotype: the app is specifically designed to “help” you with routine questions, like where a certain building is or what the library hours are. The problem, Steele reminds us, is that ” when we can only see a woman, even an artificial one, in that position [of assistant], we enforce a harmful culture”.

Many of these companies hide behind UX decisions for these gendered assistants - “the female voice or persona tested best” is a standard response from Cupertino to Redmond. But that’s a weak form of UX, where you toss ethics aside to give users “what they want,” even if what they supposedly want is colored by their own explicit or implicit biases.

The strange part is that n-powered, the company behind the app, clearly does not require us to use a gendered avatar. It’s possible that this was a default avatar no one replaced, but I am not so sure. The sample screen shot (above) on the n-powered website shows a Husky avatar, the mascot for Northeastern University in Boston, where the app started. That means that a decision was made at some point during this process to make the avatar of the GVSU app be a woman. (Or, at the very least, to keep it a woman and change the background to Laker Blue (Pantone 301).)

Why do we not just use the Circle G Logomark? Or Louie the Laker?

I have sent my concerns to the GVSU IT department, along with a brief list of suggested popular and scholarly readings (nothing sways IT departments more than suggestions to read ethics articles, right?) I will post updates as I have them.

References

1. Ni Loideain, Nora and Adams, Rachel. Female Servitude by Default and Social Harm: AI Virtual Personal Assistants, the FTC, and Unfair Commercial Practices (June 11, 2019). ↩
2. Chandra Steele. The Real Reason Voice Assistants Are Female (and Why it Matters). *Pc Mag*. January 4, 2018. ↩

A few years ago, I added a feature to ILLiad, our interlibrary load software, that searched the Michigan eLibrary catalog (MeLCat) for books that were being requested from ILL. If a MeL participating library owned the book, I’d post a nice little notice to the user to let them know they could get the book faster through MeL. (It would also be cheaper for us.) Here’s what it looked like:

Of course, this only worked on ILL requests that were manually entered. And based on the number of ILL requests that have been rerouted to MeL manually by our ILL staff over the years, it didn’t make much difference. Basically, everyone ignored my nice message and requested the item from ILL.

• 2016: 469 requests
• 2017: 552 requests
• 2018: 481 requests
• 2019: 393 requests as of September 19th.

Amy in ILL pointed out that’s 1,895 requests since we started checking MeL holdings for ILL requests. Amy continued “if we had paid our max-cost of $20 per item by obtaining via ILL, we would have spent $37,900 on the 1,895 books we obtained via MeL, so the savings is substantial.”

Amy and Deb asked if I could revisit this solution to try to bring these numbers down, since it takes a lot of staff time and can confuse users. As a first step, I wanted to look again at ILLiad, and make this background MeL search a littlemore obvious. I also wanted to make it work on every ILL request, including those that came in through OpenURL. So I rewrote the JavaScript call, revisited the PHP script that parses the MeL website in the background, and updated the visual styles to make the modal window.

Now, if you do a loan request and MeL has the title of the item you are requesting, it brings up a more obvious message that you can get the item faster from MeL, and includes a big blue button that will take you right to the MeL search. (This works whether the search leads to a single result (the record page) or if there are multiple results (the browse titles page).)

Here’s the new alert:

It just went live this morning, and I’m keeping stats on each time it is activated. Hopefully we can get those ILL to MeL numbers down for the rest of the year, and next I’ll be looking at ways to improve the catalog to MeL workflow!

Yesterday Melina and I ran our first formal usability test in nearly 2 years. We had three students in the Mary I who worked on a few tasks using the Omeka-based Digital Collections site. We had a great crowd of observers who took meticulously detailed notes and helped us whittle down a very long list of issues to a few high-priority action items for the immediate future.

The 5 task-based scenarios we had each student work through were:

1. You’ve been tasked by a professor to use GVSU library’s digital collections for an assignment on one topic of your choice. Show us how you would go about finding the collection you will focus on. [blank empty browser window open]
2. You are writing an essay covering American history up to 1877. Find some resources about correspondence between soldiers and family. [browser window is at the digital collections home page]
3. You are to write a report on the history of Grand Rapids. Which particular collections would you focus on? [the browser window is at the digital collections home page]
4. You are researching the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) using the library’s digital collections. Find some resources with people who went through the program. [browser window open at the digital collections homepage]
5. Using the Young Lords in Lincoln Park Interviews, look for interviews specifically talking about fair housing issues. [browser window is at the homepage for that collection]

The first question was designed both to see how our users understood the term “Digital Collections,” as well as to see if they could find it. None of our students had any idea of what Digital Collections meant (most thought it was anything online, put into groups). But because they had an incorrect understanding of what it was, they certainly couldn’t find it.

We discussed how Digital Collections is the kind of resource that needs some kind of facilitation, to explain to users what the collections are and why they want to use them. Melanie noted that for our on-campus users who encounter digital collections through an assignment, they will either have Leigh or a liaison introduce them, or will at least have some context provided by the professor. But for others, we discussed a few ways to help clarify not just what Digital Collections are, but what all of our separate collections are. I think there are other opportunities here for sharing this information, from social media to Web ads. And navigating to our collections is also something I want to explore in future tests. We also want to explore how easy these collections are to in the Library Search - sample searches from the users in the test showed that a lot of other stuff came up before anything in our digital collections.

(As a related note: Weave Journal of Library User Experience recently published an article on this very topic, and found that while Digital Collections was a terrible term, it as the least terrible of all the others, and most libraries use it. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Read the whole article: What We Talk About When We Talk About Digital Libraries: UX Approaches to Labeling Online Special Collections

Questions 2-5 all focused on specific, yet common, tasks in the Digital Collections system, which is a customized version of the open source tool Omeka. Let’s just summarize by saying that Omeka didn’t do so well on this test.

One quick win that we will look into is making the failed search page, where no results are returned, more user friendly. There are no hints or tips or mediated help that appear, even though this is the point where we want that mediation! Kyle and I suspect we might have to use JavaScript to make this change, but we’ve already got a JavaScript application running on top of Omeka to make some interface changes to improve usability, so that should be a big deal. (Curious about customing vendor tools with JavaScript? I wrote a whole book about it, and it’s now Open Access in ScholarWorks!)

Many other issues centered around Omeka’s search function. Our users mostly made assumptions that Omeka’s search would work a lot like Google’s or Summon’s: autosuggest, autocorrect, etc. But it doesn’t. In fact, Omeka’s advanced search requires you to explicitly use Boolean operators between keywords, but you have to use symbols, like “+” for AND and “-” for NOT. Super intuitive!

To top it off, a few years ago Kyle switched the main search functionality of Omeka over to a Solr index, that outperforms the built-in search dramatically. Unfortunately, the Advanced search doesn’t run on the Solr index. We found that the Advanced Search and Basic search would return totally different results for essentially the same search! And some buttons, like the “New Search” button, will take you to advanced search rather than to the basic search. Ugh.

Our plan right now is to do the following (although we need to do a little more research to make sure these will work and are the best options):

1. Hide the advanced search link (Need to make sure there aren’t any use cases for it.)
2. Redirect the “New Search” button to the basic, Solr search.
3. Redesign the facet sidebar on the search result page to be more prominent. Most of the users didn’t see it, and the one who did seemed to only notice it as a last resort. It kind of blends in with the rest of the page.
4. See if there is a way to limit the search box on a collection page to search only that collection - that was the behavior all of our users expected.

Kyle and I will get together over the next few weeks to look into making these changes happen. Then in the next few months, we’ll run another test for digital collections and see how the changes are received!

I’m planning on running another, more generalized test in November. Running a usability test on our website every month is a lot of work, but it has helped us really hammer away at some of the big issues facing our patrons. Thanks for participating, and I look forward to seeing everyone next month!