Catherine has designed “new look” database pages. Please take a look at the design and post any comments on Counterculture.
By clicking on the Conditions of Access link on Australia and NZ Reference Centre you will also be able to view the new look database access page.
I like them – they address the problems we had in usability testing and look nicer too.
I’m in a bit of a mood for multimedia at the moment – I think it breaks up the all-text thing we have going on a lot of our pages, makes them look more attractive and more readable, and also provides a visual cue for people who remember by images rather than by words – so I’ve also made a modified version, adding in logos for each of the databases. (This is made trickier by the fact that some databases don’t have identifiable logos but I’ve made do – good enough for a demo.) See <a href="http://library.canterbury.a…">the modified design</a>.
I think Deborah’s idea looks very nice – certainly brightens up the page, and it would be good for visual learners.
But – it would be a huge amount of work to do this! Quite apart from issues of finding, saving (the path to the file) or manipulating the images etc etc, we’d have to get copyright clearance to use the image from the supplier. Would it be worth it???
Sorry to be so negative!!
I’d be happy to do the images myself – finding/downloading/manipulating them is the sort of thing I can do on quiet desk shifts quite easily. I think copyright would be the bigger concern: I’d assumed that logos would be fair game for this sort of purpose. If that’s not the case then I agree it may be more trouble than it’s worth contacting every supplier for permission, but it might be worth finding out what the copyright situation is on that.
I like both Catherine’s new layout and Deborah’s images.
If the images are easy enough to source (a couple look a bit fuzzy on my monitor)then I think that they probably add something useful – if we had them for all databases. I’d also anticipate vendor support for using their logos in this particular context, as long as were the current ones. Unless of course they are as restrictive as CU 🙂
"Material on the University of Canterbury (UC) web pages may not be copied, distributed, or used for commercial purposes without the prior, express written permission of UC."
An interesting concept and I can see how some users could be assisted in being able to quickly recognize the branding of their favourite database. On the other hand, I wonder if it could be throwing in a red herring to have images associated with database providers for floundering users.
Slightly related comment: why do we have posters around the place advertising things like our "Epic databases" and the wealth of e-resources you can access via Epic? Who cares? (Apart from the marketing people at LIANZA or Nat Lib). What about the wealth of e-resources available at library.canterbury.ac.nz? Another idea could be to have images associated with content (e.g. full-text, NZ content, some full-text etc).
Most databases provide free buttons/logos for use in marketing databases, so there should be no problem sourcing images. Many databases also provide search boxes for direct searching of the database from your website. Where available, these would make extremely useful additions to the databases pages.