Usability Analysis in Practice: Assessment for Redesign of the School of Information & Library Science Web Site

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science (SILS) web site has existed in its current form for almost three years while web design has evolved from more simple design practices of the late 1990's, leaving the current web site dated in terms of usability and visual design. The current SILS web site draws verbal complaints from many users although little qualitative data and no concrete quantitative data has been collected regarding problems with the current site, or any previous iteration of the SILS web site. This usability study was designed to analyze the current site and identify major issues so that a more user-centric site may be developed to replace the current one. As well, it will for the first time record quantitative data on the SILS web site and establish benchmark measures that future iterative designs can be compared against. This study was designed along the guidelines of two major usability experts - Jeffrey Rubin and Jakob Nielsen - to be a quick, inexpensive and effective method of evaluating a web site design

Final Year Project Digital Library

The application of digital libraries or web archives has been significant during the past few years such as with the introduction of the web development technology and implementation of data repositories in office automation. The objective of the project is to apply the research done on file type conversion into the development of FYP Digital Library, a web archiving system for documentation management and preservation purposes. The current system has been too big and becoming difficult to handle, as the number of the final year project documents to be maintained and managed are of bigger numbers now. This has made the effort of keeping all these documents for reference purposes difficult. With the development of the final year project digital library that shall serve the function of web archive, these two main goals will be able to be accomplished. The web development project involves the application of RAD methodology as used in various smaller projects. In order to accomplish these objectives, various interviews with stakeholders and research done on file type conversion and information management and retrieval has been done and the result of these has contributed to the requirement analysis and design phases of the projects' final product resulting to the development of FYP Digital Library Keywords: final year project documents, web development, archive, file type conversion, information management and retrieva