This post-lunch session was presented by 4 librarians, two from Penn State University and two from Temple University. Each university library talked about the things they had done to improve the usability of portions of their web pages.
Penn State described how they made a simplified version of their library website using modular widgets. The main page is rather text-heavy with about 100 links. The user-friendly page has 5 boxes with a couple search blanks, a chat box, and a few links to select from. These widgets can be easily created on a website called Widgetbox.
Temple University described how they redid their subject guide pages. The pages had been static lists of links. They redid the guides using a product called LibGuides. These guides are easy to maintain by a large number of people and feature the ability for users to provide feedback via comments and tag clouds to direct users to other pages. Although the product they are using is quite impressive, a similar effect could be cobbled together using del.icio.us, some widgets, and PHP.
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