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!

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. By building on to the DukeMobile app (a suite of useful mobile services that has already amassed over 50,000 downloads since its introduction in March), we reach many more people than if we had tried to build a freestanding app on our own. As Brian Mathews wrote in February:

It is easy for us (as librarians) to complain that we don’t have money or staff to develop cool things—but sometimes that’s ok, because maybe we can partner with those who are (doing cool things) and get our materials and resources included in their work. Instead of investing our time in “a library app” we can attach ourselves to an already popular and successful app and gain a wider audience.

We like this approach. By collaborating with the folks developing DukeMobile, not only do we add value to a shared suite of applications, but we improve awareness of our fantastic collections and help insinuate the library into the mobile campus culture.

How it Works

The DukeMobile app interacts with our collections via XML feeds from our homegrown digital collections platform. By taking the do-it-yourself approach, we can control how our collections and all that data can be used by other systems. When we expose the data using open standards, we enable other developers to create additional cool and useful interfaces to help people discover our stuff. We saw this concept in action earlier this year with our 3D Wall view (using CoolIris), and this iPhone app is yet another great example.

See for Yourself

Download DukeMobile (iTunes link) and give it a try! It’s free for everyone and works on any iPhone or iPod Touch.

Related Info

• Treasures Move From Library Shelves to the iPhone With New DukeMobile Applications — Duke University press release, 6/16/09
• Browse our collections online at http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections

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!

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!