Have you noticed that alerts in the Libraries’ new site are different than they used to be in the old site? With the creation of the new site on the Drupal platform, the way in which critical information for our patrons is displayed has been upgraded.
https://libraries.psu.edu/alerts
Library alerts are those messages that we want our patrons to notice because they affect how or when the libraries and its services can be used. For example, when a winter storm hits many of our locations may close or reduce hours of service. When this happens we can proactively tell our users about the change in service through our website’s alert capabilities.
This was possible in the previous version of our website, but with the new platform we’ve made some improvements, now alerts…
- …are classified as high or low urgency
- …can be scheduled
- …can be associated with library locations
- …can be classified as a database alert
All that means we can…
- …display low urgency alerts less prominently and high urgency more prominently
- …schedule alerts ahead of time to only be active during known scheduled maintenances (e.g., when a database vendor goes down for maintenance)
- …display alerts for any location on that location’s page (e.g, if there’s a closing at Berks-Thun, we can display it on the Berks-Thun library page)
- …display alerts for databases on the databases’ pages.
All of our alerts are timestamped as well, for both the times that the alert was originally posted and the time it was last updated.
Finally, alerts are responsive – this means that alerts display in a predictable and usable way at any digital screen size.
So, keep on the look out for more library alerts and let us know if you have any feedback.