Item Pages: Inspiring Sites October 23, 2009
Posted by Sean Aery in : Website Redesign , 3comments
Before designing new item pages for our Digital Collections site redesign, we looked around the web to find exemplary sites to inspire us as we apply what we have learned while assessing our current item pages.
We looked for sites where items are presented with both clarity and context. We also looked for sites that present obvious ways to interact with an item (such as comment on it, bookmark it, or get a closer look) or help people discover related items to keep them engaged with exploring the site.
We love digital collections sites that are comparable to ours and have included some good ones here, but we were sure to look beyond library sites for inspiration as well. Sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Amazon are familiar to far more people than library sites, and their design patterns condition us all with certain expectations when we encounter any new or unfamiliar site. The goal is to find good example solutions to the challenges present in each aspect of the design, and to use the best parts of each for inspiration.
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AdViews: 3,000 New Commercials, Improved Access October 21, 2009
Posted by Jill Katte in : AdViews, Announcements , add a comment
I’m excited to announce that we’ve launched 3,000 new commercials in the AdViews digital collection on iTunes U.
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adviews/
This includes over 50 new products and brands, such as the American Association of Railroads, Burma Shave, Bounce, Eastern Airlines, Folgers, Glade, Pepto-Bismol, Prell, Sanka, and Zest. We’ve also added many new commercials for Crest, some fantastic Hasbro toy commercials from the 1970s, and much more.
The AdViews Highlights album now features over 40 commercials with closed captioning and audio descriptions created by the National Center for Accessible Media for users with hearing or vision impairments. Users can take advantage of these accessibility features using the Preferences and Controls menus in iTunes. We’ve also improved the indexing of the collection, making it easier to search for and discover AdViews content from the Libraries website.
Many thanks to Duke Libraries staff and interns, to Duke OIT, and to A/V Geeks for their excellent contributions to the project.
The digital collections team will promote some new AdViews commercials during the next few weeks on Twitter — follow us! http://twitter.com/dukedigitalcoll
Item Pages: What We’ve Learned October 19, 2009
Posted by Sean Aery in : Assessment, Website Redesign , 2commentsWe have been assessing our web interface to Digital Collections for some time using a healthy variety of evaluation techniques and soliciting ideas for a new & improved interface. Let’s first take a look at our item pages, with an annotated review of our current site:
Here’s what we have learned about the item pages, broken down by source:
Web Analytics
- Our most-accessed items get viewed mostly via external links, especially from social media tools (like StumbleUpon) and Google Images.
- More than 3/4 of item page views are for the medium image view as opposed to the details view.
