Best practices for web interfaces of searchable databases
Nicole Hennig and Christine Quirion, April 2004
Draft - working document
PurposeThe purpose of this checklist is to serve as a list of best practice ideas for the design of web interfaces to searchable databases.
In the work of the MIT Libraries we are often faced with customizing "out of the box" interfaces to various products, such as our library catalog and other systems. Sometimes we are designing searchable systems from scratch.
Since we have done many usability tests of these type of web based systems, we've come up with ideas for best practices for fixing problems that we saw, or for doing it well in the first place.
This is a first attempt to draft what some of those practices are, and it's a work in progress.
This document may be useful to those of us evaluating new systems, customizing systems we've purchased, or designing new systems.
This might apply to: library catalogs (Barton), homegrown catalogs (Vera, DSpace), commercial databases, digital library content systems, or any web-based interactive system.
send comments to: webgroup-lib@mit.edu