By Lena Geraghty, on July 1, 2014

I love finishing things. The sense of completion I feel when I can finally cross something off my list makes all the effort and hard work worth it. So I guess it makes sense that I’m not a good waiter. And that’s what last week was all about: waiting. Waiting for the staff members to answer my survey so I could continue revising the computer use policy. Waiting for the assistant city manager to get back from vacation so I could talk to her about performance measures. Waiting to hear back from the American Library Association about their recommendations for computer use policies. Too much waiting for my liking.

At least I could be a proactive waiter. I spent much of last week researching what makes a visually appealing, user-friendly public library website. Surprisingly there is a ton of literature out there, not only about public library websites but also all levels of academic libraries and library websites for children, teens, and adults respectively. However, much of this literature comes from the late 1990s when libraries were first establishing their websites for public use. Do library patrons have different expectations from their library websites nowadays? I think they do, so this week I will be developing a patron and staff survey about how the library website could be more useful for current needs.