Home, Sweet/Simple Home

We took a quick plane/road/ferry trip through Portland, Seattle, Victoria, and Vancouver. We saw lots of water, some birds and gardens, and a few libraries. A friend suggested that the new Seattle central library was worth a visit, but unfortunately, it wasn't open on Memorial Day. Instead, I had to Google it. Considering that a ten-year $290 million system wide project was just completed (including a new Central library with 500 computers!), I was not impressed with their Home Page. It was too "busy"; they also devoted a lot of space to touting their tours of the library (at that price, I guess they have bragging rights---does that sound like sour grapes?).

But back to Home. To be balanced, I googled SPL to see how it fared in comparison. I was brought via computer to the Catalog page and was quite impressed with the simplicity of Sacramento Public Library's streamlined look. The Home Page had the crucial tabs across the top and in the upper right hand corner were the most used tools: Search, Reserve a Computer, and My Account. When looking for a specific library branch, also listed were libraries in the same general vicinity. SPL is doing a valiant job of keeping the "wired" generation in mind. It is a necessity---I noticed that even on the ferries, there were many computer users plugged in.