Why Subject Guides Are Even More Awesome Than Before

Back in April (April 2, 2009 to be exact) I put up a post called Why Subject Guides Are Awesome. About a month after that, the rest of the University Libraries Web Committee and I started working on a new Subject Guides interface that would be easier to use than the old ones and could incorporate not only the Allen Library subject guides, but also Mortensen's print subject guides, web subject pages, and web reference tools. After about five months of design, web coding, and data entry, we finally went live with the new interface today (http://library.hartford.edu/allenlibrary/bigdatabase/guidelist.asp). In addition to an easier to read format, some of the benefits of the new guides are:

• The ability to search for guides via keywords
• Static URLs so you can bookmark your favorite guides
• Guides divided into categories for easier browsing
• Lists of guides related to the one you are currently viewing
• Links from book titles to the library catalog records for those books
• "Suggest a Topic" and "Suggest a Resource" forms for you to contribute ideas to the guides

We have several more improvements planned, but we wanted to make them accessible as soon as we could so that everybody could start taking advantage of them. So please take a look and let me know what you think! Feel free to leave suggestions for improvement in the comments.