New Northern Health Library Services Website with Template linking

Andornot has hosted the Northern Health (NH) Library catalogue and website on the internet for almost 10 years.  During this time it has undergone many iterations.  The most recent is one located at http://library.northernhealth.ca.

Earlier this year a new design for the NH website was implemented using the DotNetNuke Content Management System (CMS).  So while Anne Allgaier, the librarian was considering how to deal with that change, she was concurrently being pressured to move the library presence off the internet and inside to the intranet.  The major concern being that the library services were meant for internal staff only. Anne knew however, that there were plenty of users who accessed her Inmagic-based catalogue and related information from their homes or from remote locations throughout the widely distributed region.  These users would be deprived of what had become a very popular service.  Anne asked Andornot to help her find a solution to keep the library presence on the internet and to incorporate the new website design and comments:

“Andornot’s has provided the Northern Health Library with exemplary service for the past decade, providing us with solutions that make it possible to provide the level of service that the library’s clientele requires, regardless of location.”

Website Template Linking

Andornot’s philosophy has always been that web-based databases should be integrated into the website template.  So while we worked with Anne to built up layers of content on the new site to go with the library catalogue, we also liaised with the NH website developers to implement a method that taps into the always-live site template on the NH server.  This was accomplished by having a content-free page on the home server within the NH’s CMS with a specific hidden comment tag in the content area (in this case, "<!—andornot -->").  This bit of text in the content area tells our system where to parse each page's content into the source site's template.

Library Portal

So while the template remains current on the hosted site, allowing users to quickly navigate to other areas of the NH website, the library content on the site continues to grow.  It includes: 

• the BC Ministry of Health News RSS feed
• access to e-HLbc databases (requires IP authentication or username and password login)
• access to thousands of online books (requires IP authentication or username and password login)
• links to other library catalogues
• Google Book Covers with links to Google Book Previews
• Ordering cart
• a canned search (one click) and an RSS feed for recent library acquisitions
• links to various other services (Tutorials, InfoBriefs)
• Patient information website links
• Professional information website links

… thus providing NH staff, University of Northern BC medical faculty, and patients with a single access point for all sorts of resources, whether they are in the hospital, on campus, in their office, at home or on the road.