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Web Lab project

Background

In October 2008 I attended the LITA Forum in Cincinnati, OH, where Jason J. Battles and Jody Combs presented “Building a Web-based Laboratory for Library Users.” Their view is that libraries create an offer a variety of services, but use by patrons is very hit-and-miss. Why not put these items out while still in development, and get user feedback. The site is similar to a blog, with the added capability of providing immediate feedback via a form right on the page. The feedback forms utilize Javascripts from the “script.aculo.us” web site. It also has the capability to search the feedback responses given, and presents the results in a table. With LDADS’s commitment to providing the best, user-friendly online services, it seemed natural to consider creating and using a version of this tool ourselves.

Development

Programming and Design

I emailed the presenters, and Jason Battles generously provided me with a copy of the software he had created. I reworked their site to fit BSU, and gave credit in the code to Battles and his group accordingly. I re-created the site in Adobe Dreamweaver, using its templates to simplify the work. I had considered moving it to a content management system (CMS), but the systems I looked at (Drupal and Joomla) did not make it easy to add my own styles and designs; their learning curve was too steep for the time available. I also considered using blog software (Wordpress), but the results were the same as for using a CMS. So the RSS feed for the site requires manual creation of the entries.

Roadmap

For the person inheriting this project from me, the next steps should include:

  1. Preventing automated (spam) entries in the main feedback form, using reCaptcha or similar tool.
  2. Replacing the horizontal rule tags (<hr />) with CSS to get the dotted borders.
  3. Moving entire site to some form of content management, whether a full CMS (Drupal, Joomla, etc.), or blogging software (Wordpress, etc.).

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