The Dart­mouth Li­brary’s web­site got a major facelift today, as a new de­sign of the site rolled out at 9 a.m. The new home­page in­cludes com­pact left-hand nav­i­ga­tion for top-level links and a new “sin­gle-search” box that will pro­duce re­sults from Sum­mon, the Li­brary Cat­a­log, and the Li­brary web­site, ac­cord­ing to Jane Quigley, chair of the Li­brary Web Steer­ing Group. She said she hopes users will find the new de­sign cleaner and eas­ier to use.

“It has been some time since the last major change to the Li­brary’s web­site,” Quigley said. “And we felt that it was time for a lit­tle bit of a re­freshed look and feel to the web­site.”

The Li­brary’s web­site has not re­ceived a major re­design since early 2008, ac­cord­ing to Quigley. In ad­di­tion to a new look and com­pre­hen­sive search tool, the re­designed home­page will also in­clude im­ages and news on ex­hibits, work­shops and col­lec­tion high­lights from Li­brary ser­vices.

Quigley said the staff is par­tic­u­larly ex­cited about the new search box.

“We’d like to be able to make small changes and small im­prove­ments to the Li­brary’s web­site,” she said. “So from time to time, we think that con­tin­u­ally im­prov­ing and adding these en­hance­ments to the Li­brary’s web­site is re­ally just part of hav­ing a good li­brary and hav­ing a good li­brary ser­vice for our stu­dents and fac­ulty.”

The web­site was in pro­duc­tion for close to a year and went through sev­eral it­er­a­tions, as the steer­ing group gar­nered feed­back from a user as­sess­ment group and stu­dents over the past Sum­mer term.

Quigley said the staff will con­tinue to build on the web­site through feed­back from users and add a blog in the near fu­ture to liven up the Li­brary’s re­sources.

“It was very much in my mind that we weren’t doing a good a job as we could be doing of com­mu­ni­cat­ing some of the re­ally won­der­ful, ex­cit­ing and in­ter­est­ing things that the Li­brary has to offer,” Quigley said. “[This re­design] is an at­tempt to do a bet­ter job at com­mu­ni­cat­ing some of that ex­cite­ment with peo­ple and mak­ing it a lit­tle bit eas­ier and less over­whelm­ing to find the things they need and to use them.”