PTA Issue 9 (2018)
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Item What Are We Doing with the Website: Transition, Templates, and User Experience in One Special Collections LibraryDreyer, Rachael (2018-05)[Excerpt] At the Eberly Family Special Collections Library (SCL), we have found that our website is often the first place a researcher will look to learn about our repository. Our online web presence is a business card, our chance to make a positive first impression. While our library, among others, has devoted time and resources to the development of new access tools and discovery layers, we have learned that our online presence also needs updates, revisions, and improvements. New tools and access points are valuable, but we can also improve existing tools even as we look forward to new developments in access and discovery. Through conscious efforts to include end users’ feedback in our website design decisions, we create more effective online tools. Our website is a crucial component of our efforts to direct users to our collections, and to publicize our services and programs. In this same vein, our end users can contribute to this design partnership through dedicated user experience testing. The SCL experimented with collaborative decision-making with its website committee, as well as with user experience testing in order to support our requests for additional web development work from the Libraries’ Information Technology department (I-Tech). Through this process, our library gained a more holistic understanding of the needs of online special collections and archives users; we also learned how to communicate more effectively between the department who worked with end users (SCL) and the department performing the actual web development work (I-Tech). While development work was limited to working within the mandatory web template, our user experience testing and the efforts of our internal website committee resulted in a better online experience for our stakeholders, based on the feedback we received from usability testing. Although our website is always a work in progress, we feel that we were able to develop practical ways to adjust to a website migration within in a dispersed and hierarchical information technology environment.Item Archives and Airtable: Using Cloud-based Tools for Archival Survey and Workflow ManagementDirk, Katherine; Maddox, Jessica (2018-05)[Excerpt] The Special Collections and University Archives Department (SCUA) at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) began operation in 1961 as a repository for the many unique resources already held by the University. This included University history and northern Nevada historical materials not collected by the Nevada Historical Society. Some of the department’s earliest collections cover Comstock mining and milling companies as well as Nevada politicians, local associations, and modern authors’ research files. Department holdings over the years have grown to include more than 2,000 cataloged and fully accessible manuscript and archival collections, as well as 131,000 photographs, 1,110 architectural drawings, 28,000 published materials, and 25,000 digital collections objects. Although many of these materials are already available to the public, SCUA faces many of the same challenges as other archives across the country, including a backlog (Greene and Meissner 2005). A number of changes over the last four years, including the implementation of Archivists Toolkit (AT) and PastPerfect for the description, cataloging, and tracking of manuscript, archival, and photographic collections, prompted us to take a closer look at our holdings. We wanted to gain a greater understanding of the backlog while at the same time identifying physical storage locations of all materials. In June 2017, SCUA, with the assistance of the University Libraries Metadata and Cataloging Department (MCD), undertook a survey of all physical holdings, including maps, books, manuscript and archival collections, and photographs. In order to accomplish these tasks, we needed a tool that enabled us to capture an enormous amount of data in a quick and efficient manner.