A wrap-up of the 2011 Internet Librarian conference presented to the ACRL ULS Tech Section, October 26th, 2011

1. Web Highlights
from Internet Librarian 2011
Nina McHale @ninermac
Assistant Professor, Web Librarian
University of Colorado Denver, Auraria Library

2. Improving Your Website With Google Analytics
SuHui Ho & Jeff Wisniewski
• “Don’t be so proud of your total hits!” (Ho)
• They don’t tell us WHAT people do when they get
here, or how satisfied they are by their visit
• Goals and funnels in Google Analytics
(Wisniewski)
• Goals are specific pages that you want your users to
get to (20 goals are available per GA account)
• Funnels are the “optimized steps” that users should
take to get to the page
• Shows where users get lost in complex processes (i.e.,
registering for a class)

3. UX Tools of the Trade
Amanda Etches-Johnson
• Amanda’s plea: don’t have a “junk drawer”
library web site that contains everything your
users could ever possibly need
• Five techniques for better UX:
• Don’t redesign; make incremental changes
• Write for the web (inverted pyramid)
• Navigation (“where am I?”)
• Visual design (typography, white space)
• Usability: “Watch people use your site”

4. Building Support for Change & Customer Relationships
Christina de Castell, Tommy Armstrong, Doug Hahn
• Tips for communicating change (de Castell)
• What is your vision for the new “thing”?
• Be sure to point out what will improve
• What will stay the same?
• Tool for communicating between IT and students
(Armstrong & Hahn)
• Direct communication between IT staff:
• can provide better service to students AND staff
• can open IT’s eyes to user needs

5. The Great Web 2.0 Faceoff
(Tuesday Evening Session)
• Free tools are great!
• We use them all the time, but…
• My concerns:
• are we really getting/giving the IT support that we
need/is needed?
• are we developing on an “enterprise” level, or one that
truly meets our needs?
• example: Google Docs for surveys versus secure web
forms