And the Nominee is...
Auckland City Libraries
Tamaki Pataka Korero
When you visit the website of the
Auckland City Libraries you cannot help
feeling this is someplace special.
Across the front page, people come to welcome you -- an Asian businessman, an Anglo grandfather reading followed by a child with a huge pile of books, an Indian woman talking with a kid on his father's shoulder and a teenager jamming to music. A mural of Maori patterns thread behind them across the screen.
As you scroll over the image, each person comes forward and touches the screen to introduce the four main sections of the website-- "Find your subject," "Read and relax," "Explore your community" and "Teach yourself skills."
To me this navigation panel speaks volumes. It speaks to and explores Auckland's diverse community and clearly outlines the library's mission. According to their collection development policy, the purpose of the library is "to enrich Aucklanders' quality of life through the joy of reading, learning and discovering information." I believe this website makes a concrete contribution to fulfilling this purpose.
I'm nominating this website for three reasons...
- An overall welcoming look that speaks to the quality and content of the library and its patrons.
- The audacious attempt to crunch nearly entire website's content into four overarching categories.
- A depth of information that gives the reader a true sense of the Auckland community.
Through this website I will examine why I believe this website works and the few places where improvements are needed.
How I found this site
As a former journalist and newspaper designer, I have always enjoyed design. In examining newspapers from around the world I had noticed that design sensibilities vary greatly from nation to nation. For this reason I purposefully ignored American library websites in searching for a nominee and instead examined sites from Canada, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand using the LibDex library directory.
During this search I noticed that on many library websites, the graphics and information seem inanimate as they are tied to words, books and places such as the library structure. The Auckland website immediately focuses the website on people and that is what first caught my eye.
| Name of Website | Auckland City Libraries - Tamaki Pataka Korero |
|---|---|
| Web address | www.aucklandcitylibraries.com |
| Location/Library type | Auckland, New Zealand's public library system |
| Site testing information | Mozilla Firefox browser on both Mac OS 10.4 and Windows XP |
| Dates of evaluation | September 17-23, 2005 |
| Reviewer | Site evaluated by E.G. Yarnetsky. |
And the nominee is... / Content Evaluation / Technical Evaluation
Evaluation and website by E.G. Yarnetsky, September 17-23, 2005.
Fire Island Lighthouse photo from the American Environmental Photographs Collection, photo id: AEP-NYP31, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library. Via the American Memory Project
