Why should we make you click a link called 'Search catalog' only to be confronted with another page where you enter your details and click 'search catalog' again? Well, we shouldn't. And now you don't have to. You can just enter your search term and click 'Search' from the library home page
You'll also notice that we've added a feature to search this site's content. There are pros and cons for using a single search box, but for the moment they're separate. If you have any comments or other ideas for improving usability, please contact us.
Usability
The 'Search catalog' link in the top right corner has worried me for a while. It was only the other day when my good thesis student Peter Rasmussen shamed me into applying more thought to the problem. His thesis is centered around web usability and this is a good example of bad usability. Thankfully it's nowhere near as bad as some examples we encounter all too often.
I'm always the first to complain whenever I see an example of poor usability so Peter's comment got me thinking about how to improve the situation without spending a disproportionate amount of effort on a fairly minor problem.
Our subconscious minds are wonderful things and in this case, I think it was the shame that did the trick. The answer appeared out of nowhere early this morning and the solution took about 10 minutes to complete.
It's still not perfect because why should we make you choose between title, author or subject? Also, why should we make you choose between searching the catalog and searching the content of this site? Well, the real answer is we shouldn't but it's a more difficult problem to solve without writing a lot more code. Needless to say, we'll try to address that in the future.
But for now, dear readers, you have one less click to search the catalog - thanks to Peter!
Too much detail
The reason for the less-than-ideal navigation was that we are using two separate pieces of software for the library site: A content management system called Drupal to run the menu system, blogs, etc. and a Library Management System called OpenBiblio for the book catalog. The home page is served by Drupal and the search function is provided by OpenBiblio. Why did we do this? Because both are very good quality free open source software packages (that's free as in beer and free as in speech).