I. Introduction.

The Belleville Public Library in Belleville, Kansas, has made the choice,

apparently not unusual among public libraries1, to create their website with a free

blogging resource – in this case, Blogger (http://www.blogger.com)2. Public libraries in

the United States and Canada are notoriously strapped for cash, and from this perspective

the choice of a [x].blogspot.com web address makes perfect sense. Gordon and Stephens

recommend Blogger specifically as a simple, inexpensive way to make your library

website “dynamic and relevant”. They note that “blogs offer a simple way to get

information online without having to go through a system or municipal IT department, to

learn HTML, or to invest in Web design software.” (“Online Cool on a Budget,” 48.)

When discussing the choice of a blogspot.com address, which may seem too

generic to an experienced internet user, we might consider that Belleville is a common

place name (there are ten Bellevilles in North America, according to a Wikipedia search):

<www.bellevillelibrary.com> is taken by the public library in Belleville, Ontario;

<www.bellevillepubliclibrary.org> by the library in Belleville, Illinois; and

<www.bellepl.org> by the library in Belleville, New Jersey. As it turns out, however,

<www.bellevillelibrary.org> redirects to the page under discussion, so it seems that

Belleville Public Library did choose Blogger for ease of setup.

This paper will review the Belleville Public Library’s website,

<bellevillepl.blogspot.com>, according to the Rettig/LaGuardia Review Canon as

1
Searching < “public libraries” and “blogspot.com” > on Google retrieves a number of public library sites.
2
This paper will occasionally make reference to things which are and are not possible when designing a
blog through the Blogger service. Since the setup is difficult to site, if you wish to confirm these
statements I recommend that you go to the site yourself and go through the setup process. This service is
available to anyone with a Gmail account.
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presented in Rettig and LaGuardia’s (1999) article, “Beyond ‘Beyond Cool’: Reviewing

Web Resources”. I will also introduce two further review criteria that were not

mentioned by Rettig and LaGuardia. I will say at the outset that I will not be evaluating

the website from two specific perspectives, both of which I have already touched upon:

design limitations incurred by the online blogging software, and cost. Regarding the

former, as far as I can tell there are no real limitations incurred by Blogger in terms of

design, since it allows its users to edit the HTML of their blogs (see “Can I edit the

HTML of my blog’s layout?” in Blogger’s Help menu); and also, very restrictive

blogging software does not somehow make a bad website better, though perhaps more

forgivable. The site will not be evaluated from a cost perspective first of all because I do

not have access to Belleville Public Library’s financial information, secondly because a

website that is badly-designed because of cost is still a bad website, and thirdly because a

well-designed website is not necessarily costlier to produce than a badly-designed one.

II. Evaluation According to the Rettig/LaGuardia Review Canon

i. Parentage and Provenance

The masthead of the Belleville Public Library (BPL) website contains a small

photograph of what one assumes is the library building, and the title “Belleville Public

Library: Global Reach… Local Touch.” (figure 1) While the photograph will serve as

ready identification to library patrons and others who are familiar with the building, the

title has the obvious problem of not identifying which Belleville, of at least ten North

American Bellevilles, the library is located in. Further identification may have been

deemed unnecessary by library staff, who reasoned that the website was being created

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simply as a resource for the library’s existing users. This is ironic in light of the “Global

Reach” the library claims in its masthead. It is also naïve – a non-user might be

interested in this website for any number of reasons: she could be researching Belleville

as a future home, for example, or be interested in BPL’s resources for research purposes.

This site therefore runs afoul of Rettig and LaGuardia’s edict that “every good Web

resource should immediately identify itself in terms of where it comes from to establish

its credibility and reliability.”

The confusion is dispelled by scrolling down the page to the “Web Links” section

in the left-hand menu, which has links to the Belleville, Kansas town website, a list of

sites about Kansas, and the website for Republic County, Kansas. This is helpful, but is

not in fact conclusive. If the town were actually just over the border in neighbouring

Nebraska, we wouldn’t know it from this information.

To find the producers of the site, it is necessary to click the “Contact Us” link in

the left-hand menu. This gives the library’s physical address (providing confirmation

that the library is, in fact, in Kansas), the phone or fax number, the email address of the

library director, and another email address for genealogy or reference requests. The site

does, therefore, identify itself, but not immediately as the Review Canon requires.

ii. Authority

As noted by Rettig and LaGuardia, “Given the ease with which people can

publish on the Web, it is essential that the creator’s authority be substantiated.” This is

especially true on a blog site such as this one, since the publisher of a blog does not even

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need to know HTML, making the number of people who are able to publish there higher

than those who might publish on an original website.

This website offers no evidence of its creators’ authority. The full staff of the

library is listed in a post called “People at the Library,” but no credentials are given. The

library director’s email address, on the Contact Us page, is the only staff email provided,

and it could serve as a way of obtaining further information. It’s an indirect method,

however, and probably not one that many people would take.

Rettig and LaGuardia suggest that a site needs to offer evidence of its creators’

authority, experience, and qualifications. Effective ways to do this might include short

staff bios or a staff picture.

iii. Audience

The Review Canon requires that the creators of a site have clearly identified their

intended audience, have a clear idea of that audience’s needs, and treat the information on

the site appropriately for that audience.

What is the intended audience of the site? Presumably the intended audience is

composed of the patrons of the Belleville Public Library, or possibly residents of

Belleville and surrounding areas. Can this website be said to have a clear sense of this?

Yes. The site provides useful information about the library, such as hours, location,

services, and borrowing policies, all things which a library user might want to know

about. Perhaps most importantly, at the very top of the left-hand menu, just under the

photograph of the library, are links to the library’s OPAC, allowing users to search the

catalogue, place reserves, check due dates and renew books. (figure 2)

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The blog posts, aside from those containing practical information, fall into five

categories: New DVDs, New Fiction, News, What We’re Reading, and What We’re

Watching. These are all appropriate and useful for a public library site.

iv. Content

Rettig and LaGuardia state that a web resource’s content should be “clearly

described (via a scope note) on the site.” There is no such scope note here, not even so

much as blurb outlining the content of the site. It is true that the site doesn’t have an

overwhelming amount of content. However, it is not difficult to imagine a user who

thinks of a library website only as a means to access the library’s OPAC. The further

uses of the site could be easily outlined by a scope note, and the lack of one is a problem.

The BPL website contains both factual and non-factual content. On the non-

factual side, we have the What We’re Reading, What We’re Watching and News

sections. As mentioned in the previous sections, these are all germane to the topic of the

site (which is the library itself). What We’re Reading and What We’re Watching are

essentially mini-reviews of selected library material, written by the library staff. No

other information, besides title and author or actors is given about these items. Further

information might have been welcome, and links to the library catalogue would have

enabled users to check the status of the items. However, the posts are brief and

reasonably descriptive, and written in a familiar style that is suited to a small-town public

library. Figure 3 shows some examples.

Factual content includes information about the library, which has already been

mentioned, as well as some listings of useful sites. The information about the library

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seems fairly exhaustive; including hours, services, policies and contact information, as

well as information on genealogy and local history, internet access, an art collection

housed at the library, Friends of the Library, a listing of gifts and donations, and a list of

people at the library. It is unfortunately not within the scope of this paper to determine

whether this information is accurate, but apart from this the library seems to have covered

its bases in terms of providing information about itself.

The BPL has also compiled a few lists of websites. These are filed under Books

and Reading, E-mail, Information, Kansas, Kids’ Sites, and Search the Web. “Books and

Reading,” “Kids’ Sites” and “Kansas” group together useful links which are germane to

their topics and audience, and provide the type of information one might expect from

public libraries; “Books and Reading” functions as a sort of reader’s advisory service,

providing links to sites for mystery readers and romance readers, sites with tips on how to

read with children, and a site that lists “Non-Fiction that Reads Like Fiction”, to name a

few. “Kansas” provides links to the official state website, various Kansas organizations,

and the Kansas Library catalog.

The other lists, however, range from disorganized to unnecessary. “Information”,

as one might expect from the very general title, groups together sites from Britannica

Online to The Weather Channel to the Internet Movie Database, and would have

benefited from a little further organization. “E-mail,” which has links to Gmail, Hotmail,

Netscape and Yahoo!, is unnecessary (and outdated – Netscape apparently doesn’t exist

anymore, and redirects to aol.com). If a user already has an email address at one of these

providers, she probably knows how to access them already; and if a user wants to set up a

new account, there are no instructions for doing so on the site. “Search the Web” has

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links to Google, Ixquick, and Yahoo, and doesn’t seem quite as superfluous as “E-mail”;

a user might proceed from a catalogue search to a search engine. There is still, however,

the question of whether a user needs to be directed to these sites from the library page, or

whether she is accustomed to finding them on her own – or indeed, whether the user

would even expect to find these links here. Why were they included? Did the library

staff hope that their page would function as a kind of portal for its users? It’s possible

that the library homepage serves as a start page on the computer terminals in the library;

if so, then the choice to include these is explicable.

Ixquick is a meta-search engine which functions differently from Yahoo or

Google, but no scope note for it is given on the site. This leads to a glaring omission: not

a single external link on any list is followed by a description indicating what the user

might hope to find by clicking that link. This omission is similar to the omission of a

scope note on the main page. While the user can find this information on his own by

exploring a little, it would be simple to make the search a little easier by providing the

information up front. Libraries especially, as information providers, ought to provide as

much detail as necessary, and in this case a little more description is certainly warranted.

v. Creation and Currency

It may seem that an advantage of the blog format, at least from the user’s

perspective, is that it makes the site transparent in terms of the frequency of its updates.

The author’s understanding of the Blogger software, however, is that it is possible to alter

older posts without changing the posting date, and in fact that it is possible to enter any

date whatsoever when posting (this knowledge is based on past use).

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Assuming that the library is only altering their dates posted when they add new

material to a post, it would seem that the site is not getting updated very frequently. The

most recent post, at the time of this writing, was on January 9, 2008, the first post was on

August 31, 2007, and the longest gap between postings was almost two months. It would

be useful to note at this point that all of the content on the site has been entered in the

form of blog posts; for example, the contact information is found in a post titled “Contact

Us,” borrowing information is contained in a post called “Belleville Public Library's

Circulation Policies”, and so on. This is likely the reason that most of the posts are

concentrated in late August and early September 2007 – this is apparently when the site

was created.

However, we have no way of knowing when the site was really created.

Likewise, if the library staff is doing maintenance of the site – checking the links in

“Books and Reading” (which is another blog post), for instance – and not altering the

posting dates or making any note of their maintenance, it appears to the user that no

maintenance has been done. If the library wishes to continue using blog posts to store all

their information, it would be simple to post every time maintenance is done; or, a box

could be added to the left-hand navigation indicating when the site was last updated.

vi. Design

Though the previous section may have been critical of the blog format of this site,

the BPL has in fact made quite ingenious use of the format to organize their information

in an accessible way without needing to create separate pages within the website. Posts

are linked to by title or tag; “Friends of the Library” is the title of a post; “What We’re

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Watching” is a tag that has been applied to five posts. Every post, and therefore every

part of the site, is linked to and accessible from every other part of the site, thanks to a

left-hand navigation that remains the same at all times. This fulfills Rettig and

Laguardia’s requirement for “appropriate internal links among related information

sources and elements.” If the site were greater in scope, this format might become

unwieldy, and internal links could be arranged into a hierarchy, but at the present time it

works well.

The Review Canon also mandates “appropriate links for downloading auxiliary

software… required by the system.” This site doesn’t seem to require any auxiliary

software, so we can skip this requirement.

Does the site “embody aesthetic qualities in terms of color, design, harmony and

appeal”? Blogger allows users to set up their blogs using one of a number of templates.

(As mentioned earlier, it is possible to edit the HTML aspects of this template.) The BPL

has chosen a template that has a bookish, brown patterned background in the right and

left margins, and a parchment-like background for the content of the site. The font is

Georgia. The template and font may have been chosen to lend a bookish feel; this is

achieved, but the site’s aesthetic is so subdued as to be totally forgettable. The different

elements of the site are certainly harmonious, the color and design are simple and

unostentatious, but the site’s whole appeal – which is not substantial – lies in the fact that

it is too bland to offend anybody. As with any aesthetic judgment, this is of course only

the author’s subjective opinion.

One pleasant design touch, which serves to differentiate the site to a small degree,

is the use of photos of what one assumes are BPL library users, used in selected posts, for

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example “Services” and “Borrowing” (see figures 4 and 5). These succeed in giving the

user some sense of the BPL in its physical incarnation.

vii. Usability

As mentioned in the design section above, BPL has made effective use of the blog

format to create a site with straightforward, transparent organization and structure. As a

result, navigating through the site is painless. With a few exceptions, it’s fairly clear

what type of information will be yielded by clicking on any one of the internal links. The

site will likely have return users if only for the access it provides to the OPAC; more

enthusiastic library users will likely return for the book recommendations and news

bulletins, all of which are treated in an appropriate way, as previously mentioned.

viii. Medium

Displaying “a sense of their medium” is perhaps the one aspect of the Review

Canon where the creators of the BPL website fare the worst. Use of a generic blog

template and the use of only text and a few photos to convey information cannot be said

to give “a rich experience” as Rettig and Laguardia recommend. The site contains no

video or audio and in fact no special features at all; it is strictly utilitarian and

informative. The usability of the site was described as “painless”; this may be so, but it is

not thereby a pleasant site to visit.

The lack of special features on the site means that the library was either unable or

unwilling to integrate them. It is true that video and audio, for instance, are not strictly

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necessary on a site such as this one. The careful integration of them, however, might

have served to make the site a more inviting and welcoming one.

III. Evaluation According to Two Further Criteria

The two additional criteria for the evaluation of websites which are proposed in

this paper are Savvy and Interactivity.

“Savvy” can be described as the awareness of one’s situation on the World Wide

Web. It involves staying up-to-date on what other, similar information providers are

doing on the Web, and adjusting your practices accordingly; being aware of what services

are available to you and how they can be integrated with each other; and showing

knowledge of what information and assumptions are implicit in certain styles of

presentation. Savvy does not necessarily require technical expertise. Rather, it involves

the acknowledgement that the internet is not just an alternate way of communicating in

print, but that it is an entirely new medium with new possibilities. A web resource with

savvy will have been created in accordance with all the best criteria, not just because it

wants to be a good website, but because its creators know that having a website that is not

as good as it could be will say something about them and their organization.

“Interactivity” is something that might have been included in the Rettig/Laguardia

Review Canon had it been published later than 1999. In his article “What is Web 2.0”,

Tim O’Reilly identifies “Harnessing Collective Intelligence” as one of the defining

features of Web 2.0. Looking at sites such as Wikipedia and del.icio.us, with their user-

driven content, O’Reilly concludes that “Network effects from user contributions are the

key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era” (2, his emphasis). Interactivity is therefore

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defined as the extent to which users are allowed to create, comment on or modify the

content of a website.

i. Savvy

The most egregious error in BPL’s selection of the generic Blogger blog format

for their website is that it presents the library as a library that doesn’t know any better

than to use “push-button publishing”; a library that created the site out of outside pressure

or necessity as opposed to a real curiosity as to what the World Wide Web could do for it.

Small towns are thought of by some as being cultural or technological backwaters; the

library, of all public institutions, it seems, should be the most interested in dispelling that

illusion, or, if it’s not an illusion, in helping their town progress.3 The internet has made

it possible for users anywhere to have a sophisticated sense of the possibilities a website

affords, so being in a small town in Kansas is no excuse for not trying to be creative or

innovative in your web design.4

Even supposing that financial restrictions made it impossible for BPL to use

anything but a blog with a template, they don’t seem to have researched what other

libraries have done with this format. In fact, the template they have chosen may well

have been called “generic public library template.” While performing a Google search to

ascertain how common it might be for a public library to have its website in blog format,

I came across the websites for Seldovia Library (in Seldovia, Alaska) and Fairfax County

Public Library (Fairfax, Virginia), both of which have used the exact same template and

3
It may be obvious that the author, as a former small-town resident, is also interested in dispelling that
illusion.
4
In fact, the official newsletter of the State Library of Kansas indicates that this library has a presence in
Second Life, showing that the state of Kansas, at least, is not devoid of innovation. (Bill Sowers, “I Have a
Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore!”)

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similar fonts in their web setups (see figures 5 and 6). This contributes to the generic feel

of BPL’s site and, consequently, the feeling that they have no savvy when it comes to

creating a web resource. The choice of a less common template, a slight tweaking of the

site’s structure through editing its HTML, or even a change of font style or colour might

have gone a long way towards giving a better impression. Interestingly, Seldovia Public

Library’s website has not been updated since 2007; they have moved to Wordpress,

another blog publishing system, for “a cleaner look for you, the reader; a better interface

for us, the posters; and smoother portability to our (we hope) own hosting sometime in

the future.” This shows more awareness and foresight than BPL has displayed.

ii. Interactivity

O’Reilly discusses blogs in his article, in the section on harnessing collective

intelligence, specifically mentioning the possibilities of RSS. BPL, whether by choice or

by the imposition of Blogger, does allow its users to subscribe to an RSS feed, allowing

them to receive notification every time a new recommendation, news item, or other item

is posted. This is one example of a clear benefit of using the blog format.

BPL’s site might benefit from explicitly inviting user feedback on its site; the

presence of the library director’s email address does not qualify as an invitation. They

could also try to improve their library or website through the use of online surveys;

Blogger allows its users to add surveys to their blogs. Surveys have been used by public

libraries in the past to improve their services and there is no reason why this practice

should not continue on the World Wide Web.

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IV. Conclusion

The Belleville Public Library’s website is effective in many ways. It knows its

audience; it contains appropriate content; it’s usable; and it contains a degree of

interactivity. It is also moderately successful at giving a feel of currency, through dates

at the top of its blog posts. Where the site largely fails is in demonstrating parentage and

provenance, authority, a sense of its medium, and savvy; it also suffers from bland,

forgettable design. Demonstrating parentage and provenance and authority would be

easy to do, simply by adding some text to the site in appropriate places. Improving the

other aspects of the site would involve greater effort; possibly, further education of the

staff, better research, or better exploitation of other web resources. The extra effort

would be worth it, in the improved public perception and effectiveness of the site.

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Figure 1: Belleville Public Library’s masthead with photo.

Figure 2: Prominent links to OPAC and patron information.

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Figure 3: What We’re Watching.

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Figures 4 (above) and 5 (below): Use of photos of Belleville Public Library users.

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Figure 6 (above): Seldovia Public Library blog

Figure 7 (below): Fairfax County Public Library blog

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WORKS CITED

Belleville Public Library. 2008. Belleville Public Library. Accessed 15 February 2008.
<http://bellevillepl.blogspot.com>

Blogger. 2008. Google. Accessed 14 February 2008. < http://www.blogger.com/start/>

Fairfax County Public Library. 2008. Fairfax County Public Library. Accessed 15
February 2008. < http://fairfaxcountypubliclibrary.blogspot.com>

Gordon, Rachel Singer and Michael Stephens. “Online Cool on a Budget.” Computers
in Libraries 26.6 (June 2006): 48-9.

O’Reilly, Tim. “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next
Generation of Software.” O’Reilly 30 September 2005. Accessed 15 February
2008. <http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-
web-20.html?page=1>

Rettig, James and Cheryl LaGuardia. “Beyond ‘Beyond Cool’: Reviewing Web
Resources.” Online 23.4 (July/August 1999): 51-5.

Seldovia Public Library. 2007. Seldovia Public Library. Accessed 15 February 2008.
<http://seldovialibrary.blogspot.com>

Sowers, Bill. “I Have a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore!” Kansas Libraries: The
Official Newsletter of the State Library of Kansas (not dated). Accessed 15
February 2008. <http://skyways.lib.ks.us/news/publish/article_00329.shtml>

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