"Worthington Libraries (Ohio) are partnering with the Worthington Historical Society to build Worthington Memory. The goals of this collaborative project are to provide greater access to local history materials through the creation of a digital library, and to enhance public awareness of Worthington's rich history." [Library News Daily]

This is a good model for what I want my home library to do. We have some interesting history in my little town (John Lane invented the steel plow here and David Kennison died here), and none of it is really online. In fact, most of the folks that live here don't know the history, and it certainly isn't an integral part of the school curricula.

I want the Library to lead the way in this area because part of the Library's district incorporated last year, and I don't think anyone is really documenting the changes we're seeing. Convential wisdom was that we needed to incorporate in order to slow down development and keep some of the rural atmosphere. But we're also getting to watch the birth of a village and a real community. The Library is central to that community, and this would be a great service for them to provide!

"Seniors are one of the fastest growing demographics on the Web. The United States alone has an estimated 4.2 million Internet users over the age of 65. Indeed, all industrialized countries have huge populations of senior citizens, many of whom have substantial assets. Although they are typically retired, seniors lead very active lives and often have great interest in modern technologies such as the Internet, which gives them another method to communicate and stay informed.

In our study, email was the main Internet application used by seniors.... Normalizing the usability metrics so that the seniors' scores are the baseline value of 100% in all cases leads to an estimated overall usability of 222% for non-seniors. (Averaging computed as the geometric mean.) In other words, overall usability was slightly more than twice as good for non-seniors as it was for seniors....

Websites tend to be produced by young designers, who often assume that all users have perfect vision and motor control, and know everything about the Web. These assumptions rarely hold, even when the users are not seniors. However, as indicated by our usability metrics, seniors are hurt more by usability problems than younger users. Among the obvious physical attributes often affected by the human aging process are eyesight, precision of movement, and memory....

The most widely known principle for supporting seniors' computer use is to support larger font sizes than those younger users prefer. The principle may be well known, and it was indeed confirmed by our study, but still, it is frequently violated by sites that freeze text at a tiny font size.

Sites that target seniors should use at least 12-point type as the default. And all sites, whether or not they specifically target seniors, should let users increase text size as desired -- especially if the site opts for a smaller default font size.

For hypertext links, large text is especially important for two main reasons: 1) to ensure readability of these essential design components, and 2) to make them more prominent targets for clicking. You should also avoid tightly clustered links that are not separated by white space. Doing so will decrease erroneous clicks and increase the speed at which users hit the correct link. This rule also applies to command buttons and other interaction objects, all of which need to be reasonably large to be easy to click.

Pull-down menus, hierarchically walking menus, and other moving interface elements cause problems for seniors who are not always steady with the mouse. Better to use static user interface widgets and designs that do not require pixel-perfect pointing....

When websites violate the guideline to use different colors to clearly distinguish between visited and unvisited links, seniors easily lose track of where they have been. We've certainly seen the same problem among all age groups: It's confusing when websites change the standard link colors, and it's particularly confusing when the same color is used for all links, whether or not you have visited the destination page. However, seniors have a harder time remembering which parts of a website they have visited before, so they are more likely to waste time repeatedly returning to the same place.

Seniors also have a harder time using unforgiving search engines and forms. We saw users thwarted because they typed hyphens in their search queries, and punished because they used hyphens or parentheses in a telephone or credit card number." [UseIt.com Alertbox]

These are all very important things for library web designers to remember.  I learned about online fonts the wrong way, so I will NOT be using pixels when I re-design the Homer Library site. If your site has the text links tucked away at the bottom of the page in small text, you might want to reconsider that decision and at least enlarge the font size.