Timeline and Rationale
We expect our new website to replace the current one by the end of October, 2009. We are redesigning the website for several reasons:
- We wanted to present an integrated view of the services that we offer. Many patrons only knew of either the website or the online catalog, thinking that one or the other was the extent of our service offerings.
- To provide the mobile, interactive, and flexible services that our patrons are becoming accustomed to in other areas, we needed to move to a different platform. The older website (http://www3.leegov.com/library) was difficult to integrate with our new catalog system that went live in January, 2009. It was also based on technologies that are quickly becoming outdated.
- Cost savings and effective use of resources:
- Lee County as a whole, including the Library, made the decision to move our internal communications system to a new more modern platform. We will now have our website on the same platform as our intranet, allowing staff to use the same skills that they use to contribute to internal communications to contribute to the website.
- Effective use of staff knowledge -the library has many professionals working across our branches who are now able to contribute their skills not only face-to-face with patrons at each branch, but can also contribute to our online services as well.
- The library owns and subscribes to many valuable and authoritative online electronic resources. Although they are heavily used, they are a major part of our materials budget and we want to increase their use by making them more accessible to patrons.
Organization and Structure
The new site is built around our strategic goal of the library becoming a vital part of the Lee County community. This goal includes providing services to specific communities of users and providing an overarching sense of community for all of our patrons, built around reading and increasing individual skills and knowledge. To that end we have separate subsites for Birth to Five (and parents), Kids, Teens, Lifelong Learning for adults, Business users, and users of Outreach Services such as the Bookmobile, Books By Mail, and Talking Books. We also want to be a community center for the diverse groups of people that make up Lee County, and so we also have a site devoted to Language Communities.
Your participation is important and valuable to us
The library catalog, website, and online electronic resources have had more than 3.5 million visits in fiscal year 2009. We want to make sure that this site is valuable to you as an individual and to the Lee County community as a whole. Your feedback has already helped us improve this new website in its testing phase. The feedback mechanisms will remain in place as a permanent feature of the site; please use them to help us grow and improve our services to you.