Thing Ten

This is not going to be a nice entry. But I have found the Roselle Library webpage, and the links therein some of the most user-unfriendly and difficult to access anywhere. I regularly do research using some fairly obscure sources.

My browser is AOL, which is notorious for problems. But I have NEVER run into problems like when I'm trying to use the RPL site. My attempts to log on to the data bases requested and answer the questions took repeated attempts and met with no success. I was asked for my library number and pin number repeatedly and despite entering those I KNEW were correct, my login attempts continually failed. This is a problem I have encountered over and over again.

Using the online catalogue is a similar exercise in frustation. I am a pretty experienced researcher and writer. I say this to make this point: usually I can come up with two dozen "search" clues that might provide reasonable results. But when searching for a book I KNOW we own by subject - and I know it because I've shelved it or seen it - the book does not appear under the "search by keyword subject" option.

I would use the site MUCH more if it were far more user friendly and less "dense"; that is, presented in a way that clearly labels the various sites and groups them in a more logical way. I mean this only as constructive criticism. The site is hard to use, the links hard to access and many of them, when accessed, are nigh on impossible to navigate. If I had a question, the Roselle Library site or it's links is one of the last places I would go.

So, alas, I cannot answer the questions, though it is not for lack of trying. As I said, it is possible that my browser may be contributing to this problem but I suspect this may be the case for many patrons as well. My kids won't use the RPL site and they are extremely computer saavy. I have yet to see a library site that I have found done really well so I can't point to a "good example" to illustrate what I think might be a template for improvements. I can only comment that I regularly must access the Satan-of-All-Websites, that of the Internal Revenue Service, and compared to the library site, it's a snap to use. I will keep trying to use the RPL site using a different computer to see if that makes a difference, but in all honesty, I am skeptical that it is being utilized by patrons in the way we wish it would be and a large part of that has got to be the difficulty in accessing and navigating it.