Intranets should provide quick and easy access to organizational information. The University of Alabama Libraries' intranet was only partially satisfying this basic expectation. Librarians could use it to find forms, policies, committee assignments, and meeting minutes, but navigating the libraries' intranet was neither quick nor easy, and it was…

The growth of E-business has made experience in server-side technology an increasingly important area for educators. Server-side skills are in increasing demand and recognised to be of relatively greater value than comparable client-side aspects (Ehie, 2002). In response to this, many educational organisations have developed E-business courses,…

This article details the process of upgrading and expanding an existing academic medical library intranet to include a wiki, blog, discussion forum, and photo collection manager. The first version of the library's intranet from early 2002 was powered by ColdFusion software and existed primarily to allow staff members to author and store minutes of…

Library intranets require flexibility and efficiency and enhance the internal communication and collaborative nature of creating and organizing the institution's information. At the University of Houston Libraries, the focus was on public services, so little attention was given to the intranet--the tool every department relied on for quick access…

The days of top-down communication and controlled internal messages at a library organization are--or should be--behind us. Modern libraries must be fluid and flexible organizations with equally nimble internal communication infrastructures in place to keep up with the fast-paced environments that have been created in these organizations. As is…

The article presents a new technology design methodology that the authors have termed "Bonded Design" and that was applied by two intergenerational teams comprising adults and grade-three elementary school students in one case, and adults and grade-six students in a second case. The objective of each team was to design a low-tech web…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore both accessibility and usability and examine the inhibitors and methods to evaluate site accessibility. Design techniques which improve end-user access and site interactivity, demonstrated by practical examples, are also studied. Design/methodology/approach: Assesses various web sites for…

Presenting electronic resources to users through a federated search engine introduces unique opportunities and challenges to libraries. This article reports on the decision-making tools and processes used for selecting collections of electronic resources by a project team at the University of Arizona (UA) Libraries for the Association of Research…

Most large enterprises now have some type of portal to organize their internal information services. Few, however, have the long history of the SPIKE project at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Originally developed during the 1994-1995 school year, SPIKE was an intranet information portal before the term "information…