Response to the April 7 debut of ALA’s redesigned Web site has been mostly positive, said Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels in a memo to staff the next day, although “a few issues have emerged which will take a bit longer to resolve.”
There was plenty of negative response, however, lighting up the ALA Council and other electronic discussion lists in the days that followed the premiere. Although mounting the new site was announced as a “transition” that would no doubt require a “period of adjustment,” many judged the site to be basically flawed. Other criticism centered on three deficiencies: the extreme length of most new URLs, the lack of automatic “redirects” from many old URLs, and the slowness and inaccuracy of the search engine.
Karen Schneider, a member of ALA Council and former “Internet Librarian” columnist for American Libraries, was particularly adamant about the “inchoate disarray and arrogant disregard for the reader” displayed by the new site’s “undesign,” as she dubbed it. She maintained that there are fundamental design problems that should have been anticipated. Many discussion participants on the Web4Lib list agreed with Schneider.
Fiels responded to the critics with a statement asserting that ALA staff was committed to making “many improvements and adjustments,” including redirects for more pages and increased search-engine speed. A special e-mail address has been set up at feedback@ala.org for suggestions and complaints.
Posted April 14, 2003.