Northbrook Public Library

First established as a reading room in 1919, Northbrook Public Library has since grown to 85,341 square feet, serving a diverse community of over 33,000. Providing an accommodating environment for the dissemination, exchange, and evaluation of ideas and information, they are always working to create the best online hub possible for their collection of materials and services offered. This mission is accomplished through their website. Teaming up with Duo’s designers and developers, their site was redefined as an contemporary, ever-evolving web portal that continues serving their staff, the ideas they support, and the visitors they work to benefit.

Goals

Northbrook knew they needed a change, and they wanted it to happen with Drupal. The current site wasn’t so much a portal for the library, but a hub for the city of Northbrook with an unobtrusive library section. Focus was scattered between many sections, and there was little to no visual or organizational draw to their impressive resource center. Many pages (some of which could be consolidated) were static, custom HTML, difficult for staff to work with and hard for visitors seeking specific information to find.

Working together to formulate new information architecture and implement a website redesign, Duo and Northbrook planned how to best bring the library to the forefront. By migrating and restructuring most of their current content, implementing the provided design into a Drupal theme, and enabling administrators to make updates, Northbrook would retain the features and community aspects of their old site, but have the structure, flexibility, and usability provided by Duo’s strategy and Drupal’s strengths.

Solutions

Design

Northbrook’s prior look and feel was based more in a print aesthetic. The team implemented Northbrook’s design into a custom theme called Northbrook-Garland, which was tableless and multi-column. The process was smooth- regular communication with the Northbrook team helped make a design that supported the back end,  allowed them to more easily update and manage content, and highlighted areas of interest. Events, recommended books, and reviews were called out with color and style, while the kids’ and teens’ sections were differentiated with original styles, setting them apart from the rest of the site with unique color schemes and banners. Age group-appropriate imagery and construction gave them distinct personalities, and created appeal specific to their respective demographics.

Throughout this process, designers created a mobile stylesheet, which at the project’s conclusion would give mobile users a simplified yet effective user experience. They also incorporated social media, styling blocks that brought visitors directly to Twitter and Facebook.

Development

Working from the sitemap and eventually internal wireframes, developers migrated the entirety of Northbrook’s content, and added new sections as well. Using Views, Taxonomy, and a variety of Blocks, Duo made their content dynamic, better organized, and easier to manage, condensing it into easily navigable sections and eliminating the need for many extraneous stray pages. Applets and widgets were reconfigured in ways that didn’t slow page load, and left more room to highlight priority information.    

Duo kept and improved many key features of the old site. The external link searching the library catalog was incorporated as a block, so it could be accessed both from the site, and from anywhere on the site- integrated into the greater structure instead of a hard to find standalone. The dynamic calendar was also retained, but like the external catalog was better incorporated into the larger site, and provided ways to filter out events without leaving the page. The Event content type also allowed for a high level of customization, which worked well with the diversity of Northbrook’s community and offerings.

The research areas, specifically subject guides, were more difficult to define. Large amounts of information had to be filtered and displayed multiple ways, sometimes on the same page. Making the subject guides both visually accessible and easily sortable proved something of a challenge, but by using Panels to section off different search/display functions to separate parts of a single page, Duo created a layout that not only worked, but could be altered by Northbrook as necessary.   

Results

At its core, the collaboration between Duo and Northbrook focused the site on the library, paring it down to what needed to be shown and using new designs to display it in a way that accented its stronger, more condensed structure and wealth of content.

Training sessions with library staff with varying levels of technical expertise provided Duo valuable feedback on administrative functionality- how it could be adjusted to better serve their requests and needs. As a result of this, following launch Northbrook was not hesitant to take control of the site, frequently adding new content and making a variety of structural updates. No longer relying on a few people to make many changes, their content can be kept fresh, relevant, and can easily expand to encompass a variety of materials and audiences. Through Drupal and Duo, Northbrook has a site that belongs to everyone.

Key Modules

Taxonomy- The Book, Music, Movie and Organization Content Types, Events and Blog entries could not have been as dynamic and effective without the ability to tag and subsequently organize. Filtering by Audience, Genre, and Type (in the case of Organizations), Northbrook is able to easily cater equally to all, providing resources for every visitor’s needs.

Panels- Parts of Northbrook’s Research section were set up in ways that benefited greatly from multiple information formats in one page. This did not follow the format of any other page, but was made possible by Panels. Unlike Views, this module provided Northbrook administrators a large degree of control over positioning and format.