Overview
While opinions are mixed on whether or not Western Libraries is haunted by the ghost of Mabel Zoe Wilson, there is no controversy around the navigation and accessibility issues in the buildings. After working at Western for 30 years, a fellow librarian was giving a tour of the building and got lost during the tour. A senior student told me that she had never been anywhere other than the main floor of the buildings as she found the building intimidating and wasn't sure she was allowed. Students who can't use the stairs for any reason cannot get to Zoe's through the Wilson main entrance, and have to use a circuitous route through Haggard to get there. Anyone who has ever tried to find a book in the collection understands the struggle.
Goal
Find a Space is a tool to help students identify and locate the perfect study space, locate services throughout the buildings, or identify and locate an appropriate restroom. Find a Space is also linked to OneSearch, the libraries' catalog in order to provide maps and directions to materials throughout the stacks.
Accessibility was a significant goal for the site. We were lucky to have input from David Engebretson, the Digital Technologies Accessibility Coordinator at Western. He provided feedback and advice on both the site and the content, which includes maps and written directions to each of the spaces. We also engaged multiple students with mobility issues to provide feedback on accessible pathways and the accessibility of our spaces.
We also spent some time improving the back-end interface used to add new spaces to the site as we hope to expand the site to include additional campus spaces and buildings. If you'd like to add spaces in your building to the site, please contact us!
Strategy
Inspiration: The site was inspired by Find a Space at Harvard and Scout at the University of Washington. Western's site, however, is completely built in Drupal.
Before the site was built, we worked with our facilities manager, Kate Farmer, to identify spaces we wished to use on the space and to gather data about those spaces. We then used the Feeds module to load that data into a custom content type.
In order to maintain consistency and decrease repetitive data, the site uses taxonomies heavily and also utilizes a custom content type called "direction chunks." This content type allows us to re-use directions in chunks, so that the directions to the enter the library, or get to the south elevator in Wilson can be written just once and then reused for every location that uses that path.
Almost all the content on the site was created by a fabulous student employee, Emma Geary. Emma also provided feedback on how to improve the user interface for inputting the data, wrote a "how-to" handbook, and collaborated on a glossary of terms and phrases to use in building content. These tools will make it easy for us to expand the site to other campus buildings.
After Find a Space went live, Ron Chesko, the Libraries Systems Administrator, built a connector to OneSearch, the libraries catalog. This allows us to generate directions to specific locations where materials are located throughout the buildings from the catalog utilizing the data in Find a Space.