GALILEO Gets a Makeover: Four New Styles Now in Production
When GALILEO woke up on March 17th, it was wearing a whole new wardrobe: fresh green, vivid red, and glowing purple, in addition to the original smart GALILEO blue, adorned the faces of the four new user views: Library, High School, Teen, and Scholar. Especially tailored for the unique needs of each community, the new user views represent the culmination of months of designing, stitching, and fitting by many dedicated people, including the Community Customization Working Groups, who developed the functional requirements and participated in the user-centered design process; the GALILEO staff, who developed prototypes and an entire new system to support the customizations; and the staff in libraries throughout the state who participated in beta testing and provided feedback along the way. This collaborative spirit of GALILEO continues to yield exceptional results; everyone can feel proud to be part of such a unique statewide effort to serve library users.
The user interfaces offer multiple new “accessories”, including:
- subject-based discovery of databases, journals, and federated search results
- default federated searches tailored to each user view
- bookmarkable pages
- browsing by material type
- library catalog searches
- database spotlights featuring thumbnail previews
- links to local library information
- faster page loading
Although the new users views have been available in beta for review by libraries and users for some time, now that the new styles are available in production many will recognize some details that they hadn’t really noticed yet, and have questions or suggestions. GALILEO will be capturing suggestions for change and going into the change review process. So, while much has been accomplished, changes will continue as we all get more experience with the new interfaces and suggest improvements. Who knows where all of this fashion sense will lead? GALILEO Upgrade Project Runway? Stay tuned…
