Redesigning Duke Digital Collections September 8, 2009
Posted by Sean Aery in : Interface Features, Website Redesign , 5comments
This fall, we’re redesigning the web interface to our Digital Collections. And we want your help.
We unveiled our current interface back in January 2008, starting with a modest six collections, mostly of photographs and other images. The system/website we built was pretty sufficient for that group of content. It did some things well that marked significant progress at the time: it let you search across collections, it gave you facets to narrow your search results, and it gave you nicely bookmarkable URLs for items and search results.
Fast forward 18 months to today. Our Digital Collections Program is firmly established and clicking on all cylinders (see our past blog posts for a recap of the past year & a half). We’re now hosting almost 30 collections in this system, and we’re introducing new collections all the time. We have a diverse and growing range of digital formats like videos and books. We have explored hosting content in places like YouTube, iTunes, Flickr, and Internet Archive. The Web has been rapidly evolving around us. And our site has now been around long enough for us–and our users–to have kicked its proverbial tires to get a good sense of what it’s doing well versus where it’s falling short. It’s getting pretty clear that we have outgrown this site. It’s time to take it to the next level.
It’s the perfect time for a redesign. Change is in the air. Our team has been working hard on building our new repository, metadata editor tool, and index (Codename: Trident), and all that behind-the-scenes wizardry opens up a wealth of opportunities for improving the ways that you, as someone who uses our website, will be able to discover our digital treasures.
We have some ideas of our own for improvements, and we’ll share them here on the blog shortly. But we really want to hear from you about your ideas. Join in the conversation here on this blog in the comments section. Tune into this new category (Website Redesign), where we’ll share information throughout the fall, including updates, mockups, analysis, and more. You can also give us feedback privately at this page, if you prefer. Everything’s fair game, from aesthetics to information organization to functionality.
We’re looking forward to hearing from you soon!
Library Digital Collections? There’s an App for That. June 16, 2009
Posted by Sean Aery in : Interface Features , 8commentsAmid the excitement surrounding the new iPhone this month, we’ve got our own exciting announcement: an iPhone app for Duke Digital Collections! A mobile interface to search and browse 20 of our collections (over 32,000 images) is now included in the free DukeMobile app. [press release in 'Duke Today']
Here’s a 3-minute demo of the app:
Approach
Providing an iPhone interface to the collections helps us to reach an audience–whether at Duke or beyond–that is increasingly mobile. (more…)
Digital Collections… on Paper! March 6, 2009
Posted by Sean Aery in : Interface Features , add a comment
Have you ever tried to print out anything from our Digital Collections site, like a cool historic advertisement, an old documentary photograph, or a list of search results? If so, you probably got a printout with some less-than-ideal formatting and some extraneous near-blank pages.
Today, we implemented a print-specific stylesheet, so give it another try and let us know what you think!
One of our core aims for our system is to be able to deliver items from our collections in the formats that are most ideal for the various ways people will use them. Lots of people print web pages, and what works on-screen isn’t always best on paper.
Here were our goals for the print styles:
- maintain branding for Duke LIbraries, Digital Collections Program, and individual collection
- remove interface elements like search boxes and facets that do not provide value on paper
- write out the URL of copyright & reproduction information for items
- eliminate unnecessary page breaking
- support landscape & portrait orientation
- support all major browsers/platforms
- make table headers repeat on subsequent pages
There’s another feature we’re working on implementing (in the not-too-distant future) that should also make things easier to print: PDF generation. It should be especially useful for multi-paged items. We’ll keep you posted on this blog about all coming interface updates…
Happy printing!
3D Wall View in Search Results January 9, 2009
Posted by Sean Aery in : Interface Features , 3commentsYesterday, we introduced a new feature in our digital collections interface: the 3D Wall. This is an exciting new interactive view of search results that enables quicker navigation through pages of thumbnails and between items, smooth zooming to high-quality images, and image slideshows.
Here’s a 4-minute demo:
(see larger, high-quality version)
3D Wall uses the program CoolIris. The embedded version requires only that your browser has Flash player; through to use full-screen view, download the CoolIris browser plugin from http://cooliris.com.
Try it out and let us know what you think!
