Our first LibGuide design meeting took place September 18th.
For today's meeting, I prepared a printout of the entire guide, along with a cover page that could serve as an overview of its organization. Then in preparation for our meeting I also reviewed some of other map library sites, including those at Penn State and at Dartmouth University, to see if there might be organizational or content elements that we could easily adopt. Finally I dropped by Chris' office with the printout so that he would have time that afternoon and the following morning to gather his thoughts - 6 hours prep time total.
During the 1 hour meeting, we discussed our ideas for reorganization. Chris felt it would be important to use the entrance page to direct users to the online materials, since it would make sense that these might be the most popular features. As we navigated the site together, Chris indicated that the most popular link on the site was the link to "Popular Maps for Long Island Research." This page, which hasn't been updated in over ten years, is the first choice on the pull-down under Finding Maps.
It appeared to me that much of the website's organization was based on an old template - several of the features such as "Articles," "Book/Reference," and "Citation" also appeared in other guides I had been reviewing. Chris agree to check with Darren on this, and whether any of these elements were in fact required. We attempted to navigate the Long Island Maps collection on ContentDM. It is quite difficult for librarians, let alone patrons, to find their way through the ContentDM holdings without some sort of external guide to the content. Finally, Chris agreed to work with Darren to develop a test version of the Maps and Remote Sensing Imagery LibGuide. This development site is now available, and is called simply "Maps BETA."