Participants sort cards during NewCity’s on-site visit in February.
The website redesign project has gotten underway. We are currently in the discovery phase, which has several objectives: to identify stakeholders and learn about their goals for the project; to uncover our needs as local communities delivering shared resources; to understand our technical infrastructure and plan for the future; and to strategize future engagement with our internal and external audiences.
The project is being managed as a joint venture between Rutgers University Libraries and NewCity, a website design company experienced with higher education, large non-profits, and commercial companies. The project team, which is co-led by Antonio Barrera (Library Applications and Development) and Amy Kimura (SUS), includes members from across RUL: Doug Allen, Matt Badessa, Megan Lotts, John Powell, Jonathan Torres, and Yini Zhu.
On February 11 and 12, 2020, three members of the team from NewCity came for an on-site visit. They met with the project team, Cabinet, and additional faculty and staff representatives from across the campuses to lead a number of activities designed to explore the needs of our stakeholders, communities, and to reflect on each unit’s similarities and differences, while considering success measures for this project. One of the main goals was for NewCity to get to know us so they can be sure they’re capturing the authentic voices of the libraries.
NewCity will use these conversations and stakeholder interviews, together with a wealth of other qualitative and quantitative data, to build a comprehensive Discovery Report that they will deliver in the coming weeks. This report will help inform our site’s design and content strategy. We’ll make it available on the project team’s website, where you can also find other key documents related to the project.
We plan to launch the new sites in June 2021 in order to minimize mid-year disruption. That gives us ample time to build the sites, provide training, and populate the new spaces with helpful, up-to-date content that best fits the need of each location and supports streamlined delivery of our shared resources. We will continue to update our project team site as we make progress, so check back frequently.
