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.

Here are 10 item page interfaces that inspire our thinking as we redesign ours.

What do you think? Are there other sites with features we should emulate? Leave us comments here on the blog, or create a free Notable account and post your comments on the annotated screen captures above.

Related posts:

Item Pages: What We’ve Learned

Here’s what we have learned about the item pages, broken down by source:

Web Analytics

1. Our most-accessed items get viewed mostly via external links, especially from social media tools (like StumbleUpon) and Google Images.
2. More than 3/4 of item page views are for the medium image view as opposed to the details view.

Usability Tests (Spring 2008)

1. Users recognized the social media tools we chose to put in the ‘Add To’ section, but didn’t anticipate using those particular services.
2. Users were able to easily toggle between the details and the image view.

Feedback Forms and Other User Feedback

1. It’s good to have multiple image sizes available.
2. It’s unclear how to get to all of the details for an item.

Interviews with our Collection Sponsors

Desired improvements:

1. A comment box on items for users to contribute information.
2. Better page-turning for multi-paged items.
3. A way to get a citation for each item.
4. Connection to info about item’s archival source collection.
5. Easier printing, especially for multi-page items.
6. Clear display options for seeing the item and/or its metadata.
7. Multiple export options–especially for multi-page items.
8. Cleaner metadata display, separating technical from descriptive metadata.
9. Customized presentation of items for certain collections or item types.
10. Clarity to user what the rights / acceptable uses are for each item.
11. A way for items to be identified as part of more than one ‘collection’, especially broader collections like ‘documentary photographs’ or ‘moving images.’

CIT’s Ideas for Helping our Images be Used for Instruction

1. Integration w/social media tools (like ShareThis) and blogging platforms.
2. A ‘download’ button (where allowed) w/multiple size options, esp for use in PPT.
3. Copyable ‘Embed code,’ including citation.

Other Ideas from the Implementation Team

To accompany all the ideas and info gathered above, here are a few additional ideas we’ve had in our implementation team discussions:

1. Ability to export items in PDF, especially for multi-paged items
2. Automatically-generated ‘Related Items‘
3. Integration with our internal metadata editor so staff can edit from public interface
4. Permalinks with URL handler
5. Full-text display alongside images where available
6. Aesthetics: page should be wider; item title needs more prominence

Now, what do we do with all this feedback? First, we’ll share good example interfaces from around the web that tackle some of these same issues in various ways. Once we’re feeling fully inspired, we’ll draw up some prototypes to share. Stay tuned!

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!