After more than a year of designing, committee meetings, redesigning, more meetings, and lots of tweaking, the Butler University Libraries have a new website! It’s at http://www.butler.edu/library.

Besides a totally new look, which has been described as warm, colorful, clean, clear, professional, classy, tasteful, and straightforward, the navigation system has been overhauled, organizing all the information more by task than by audience. There are three main categories: Research, Library Information, and Help. That covers all the hundreds and hundreds of pages we have on the library website.

One new feature is an embedded RSS feed from our library blog, DawgBlog, which provides a link to the blog and the three most recent headlines. This way our “Library News” section stays dynamic without having to draft people to regularly write “news articles” to keep the news changing.

Another nice feature is the Ask A Librarian program. We had that before on the old site, but only as a link at the bottom of every page. Now we have a more prominent graphic that includes the faces of every librarian who works at the Reference Desk. When you click on Ask A Librarian, you are taken to a page that tells you how to get in contact with the Reference Desk, with the choices of telephone, email, or instant messenger. If you follow one of those, you know you’ll be speaking (or typing) with one of the people you’ve seen on the website.

The August release of the new website was accompanied by the use of our new library logo, which is now at the top of every page. It’s a totally new look for graphics representing our library and it looks modern and traditional, steady yet fluid, at the same time. The flame symbol in the logo was actually taken straight out of the Butler University seal. Just one element, but providing continuity between academia and library technology, which is something that academic libraries always seem to struggle to do.

We invite you to visit our website and see what we’ve done. Comments and questions are welcome.