So today, I can finally show you what I’ve been working on at my new job, that I started a little less than six months ago.

The Boston Public Library unveiled today its new website, now available for public preview.

The website can be viewed here: https://bpl.bibliocms.com/, and we’re really excited about a few features:

1. It’s mobile friendly. The current website is not mobile friendly, which is a big problem in this day and age, so we’re very excited to move into this responsive design.
2. It’s much more accessible. We still have to do testing with user groups, but the platform we are using, BiblioWeb, already has some accessibility tools baked into the content management system, and they’re working on releasing a new version soon, that will focus a lot more on accessibility. This is really exciting for me, because accessibility is a passion of mine.
3. We have been able to cut down on the content on each page by moving a lot of our general information into an Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) database, which should help reduce the amount of content a user has to sift through to find the answer they need.
4. The homepage allows us to feature events, blog posts, online resources, and other things in our collection that users may not know very much about. The Boston Public Library is the third largest public library in the United States by collection size (after the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library), so we always have really cool things that no one knows about. We are hoping this way people will be able to learn more about some of those items.
5. And the last key feature I want to point out (thought I could go on and on about this website) is that since we are using the content management system from the same company that supplies our catalog, we can do all sorts of cool things like feature upcoming events in the catalog. So, if a user is searching for J.K. Rowling, and she’s coming to the library to speak, her event will pop up in that search as well. We also can add titles from the catalog to our blog posts, and users will be able to place a hold on an item from a blog post, which is really exciting.

Anyway, I’m very excited about this, and I hope you all check it out. We also have a video tour of the website that you can check out here, narrated by my boss (doesn’t he have the best voice?), and you can also provide feedback using this form.