The Stanford Libraries website has a new look and feel. We asked our users for feedback and set out to create a site that is streamlined, accessible, and intuitive. Learn more about the process below, and let us know how we did.
Our vision and goals
The Libraries are here to support the needs of Stanford students, faculty, staff, and visiting scholars. We see the Libraries website as a switchboard that can quickly connect our users to the resources they need. Our goal is to provide a vibrant and welcoming environment for all patrons to discover all that the Libraries’ people, programs, and places have to offer.
Five pillars
One of the ways in which we tried to streamline the website content was to focus on the five “pillars” of Stanford Libraries:
- Services: the things we do to help with your research, teaching, and learning.
- Spaces: the physical and virtual spaces where these services are offered.
- Subjects: the areas in which our specialists collect resources to support your work.
- Collections: the physical and digital materials we have collected, organized, and made available for you to access.
- Research support: from subject guides, research consultations, and digital-humanities workshops to data services, citation management, and scholarly communications, we are here to help at every step of the way along your research journey.
Design principles
Before we started, we asked you, our users, what you did and did not like about our previous site. You told us that you wanted to spend less time on our website to learn more about the services that we offer—and we listened. Our team of professional user experience designers and programmers have worked hard to develop a site that is streamlined and intuitive. We designed our pages to work on any device and brought in professionals to teach us how to write better for the web, so that you can quickly find the information you need and be on your way.
Accessibility
Here in the Libraries, we share the university’s commitment to making our resources available to all users. That’s why we worked with Stanford Web Services on custom tools to improve screen readability and asked our colleagues at the Stanford Office of Digital Accessibility to review our site and teach us how to make our content more accessible.
Let us know how we did!
We know that launching a new website can be challenging. Our team has worked hard to make sure that you can still find everything you need, and we’re confident that you’ll find the new site easier to navigate. Building this new website has been a long process, and we’re not done yet. We’ll keep working on delivering new content and improving your experience, and we want to hear what you think.