First of all, look up. See the Library’s balustrade? You can get everywhere on our site from there. The balustrade is on every adult page. Tucked under the balustrade on the left are two tabs taking you directly to the two most popular pages from our old site, the catalog and eBooks. Top right is the date and today’s hours.
Screenshot of right hand side of the Library Home Page.
The three red tabs on the home page (see screenshot to the right) give you search boxes for searching the catalog and most of our online databases. The final tab will take you to our downloadable eBook etc. page. Underneath the red tabs are our hours, general contact information, and directions. Underneath that are three tabs displaying our programing for adults, teens and children.
So the basic rule is look to the right for basic things and look up for everything.
Let’s quickly go through the menus on the Balustrade from left to right, highlighting what is new.:
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Home – Thomas Wolfe was wrong. You can go home again and from anywhere on our site.
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Books and more – It has mostly what you’d expect, but some more. Zinio is a brand new service which provides online subscriptions to 40+ magazines, ranging from The Economist to Thrasher. Recent Orders are just that. Just remember that as soon as we order something, you can place a hold on it.
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Research – These pages are somewhat in flux as New York State will change the online resources it provides come July 1. Once that settles in, we are going to try to organize it by user type, e.g. “for students”
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Things to do – This is where you can check the schedules and also reserve a museum pass.
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Teens
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Children
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About – Here’s where you’ll find out stuff about the library. Check out the Contact Us page. It has actual photos of real librarians.
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FAQ – this is the newest portion of the site and the least developed. The aim is to, over ime, create a place where our users can help themselves when they are stuck. We also want to add user suggestions on how to do things.
At first it may be a little hard to use this new page. We realize that. We also suspect a lot of our patrons will think, “If the old page wasn’t broke, why did you fix it?” The key is to take a deep breath and just look around. As always, if you get stuck give Reference a call at 914 834-2281 x. 3.