Internship @ Berea College: Day 43-49 (Entry 43-49)

I have been working with Charlotte. She just started at Berea and will be at the Library for a 12 month job as instructional specialist. She is a former Berea grad and married to a man that I use to work with at my student job for Berea. We have talked before but we have not had to interact much. The past few days, we have been working on the virtual library tour (VOLT). We have looked at the old Berea tour on the web, articles of how other people are approaching library tours, and tours/interactive maps from other libraries. Our favorite interactive map is the one for the IU Law Library: http://www.law.indiana.edu/lawlibrary/about/map.shtml.

We like the scroll over feature that shows a picture and description on the right-hand side of the screen without disturbing anything or making a pop up that will hinder easy navigation. However, we also found for the top floor, where the main stacks are located, need to have links to a pop up in order to allow a closer look and easier navigation through the library. We also wanted to make a page that would allow the user to go and select what they wanted to find. I said that is should be like a transparency. You have a page where all the floors are viable, with only certain aspects that will help a person with navigation, and where you could select network ports and have dots pop up over the maps to show you where they are. Some of this came from the old Berea Virtual Library tour. Others came from tagging and the common computer software and online activity that has selection tools to narrow down a price of what a person wants to select for a folder view on a computer.

We had to take the old versions of the library map and work on getting those where we wanted them first. We thought of symbols and the bare minimum of information that we wanted to get on there. The biggest change is that things are moved around in a library. We wanted the badly drawn maps to be accurate. We did not know how the future map would be made though.

We then made up a story board and a low-fi paper prototype to show to Julia (and the web team when it was approved). Making the prototype was my idea and it was great to see it in action, especially with someone that has not been in my classes and did not understand where I was going with the process until we were half way through. It was a lot of fun. We used glue, paper, and such. It felt like art class. I know will get across our ideas in a visual manner and will help in our discussions with the web team on how and what will be used to put it together, as well as if it can be done.

Here is the scroll List:
Top Floor:

• Dewey sections (000,100,...900)
• General Fiction
• Group Rooms and Carrels

Main Floor:

• Media (DVDs, CDs, etc.), players, and AV room
• Group rooms and Carrels
• Reference, Indexes, and Atlases
• Circulation
• Reference Desk
• Public Computers/Xpress
• Recent Periodicals/Newspapers

Bottom Floor:

• Children's Collection
• Special Collections
• Microforms
• Bound Periodicals
• Group Rooms and Carrels

Here is the Selection/Colored Dot section:

• Computers, Network Ports, and Power
• Printers, Scanners, and Copiers
• Single Project Desk, Group Project Desk, Chairs