How do we make Duke Digital Collections happen?  Well, obviously, our secret is glamour, which comes as no surprise to those of you who know us.  But as with Miss Denney in this advertisement from our Ad*Access collection, there’s a bit more to it than that, and it takes a lot of work to get there, especially since we try to avoid disturbing fatigue lines and “crepey throat” along the way.  (We know this ad is tiny here, but trust us, it’s worth clicking on to experience its full glory.)

We were recently asked to write about the Duke Digital Collections program for the Duke University Libraries Magazine.  The results appear in five articles in the Fall 2009 issue of the magazine, and you can read them online here.  Among other things, you can read about the history of digitization at Duke, the global reach of our digital collections, the creative interfaces we use to open the doors to our collections, the behind-the-scenes steps in the creation of a new digital collection, and how our digital collections are being used in the classroom.

Thanks to our friends at the magazine for giving us the opportunity to talk about the Duke Digital Collections program!

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

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

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!

Note: This is a guest post by Kelly Wooten, Research Services and Collection Development Librarian of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture in the Duke University Libraries. Kelly is curator of the Bingham Center Zine Collections.

The Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture has a collection of over 4,000 zines written by women and girls from the early 1990s to the present. So far we have about 2,600 of these issues cataloged in a metadata-only database. At first glance, the zines look like perfect candidates for full-scale digitization. They are frequently used by researchers from around the United States and beyond, have great visual appeal, and often are the only copies to be held in an archives. Digitizing would help preserve zines from heavy use and promote broader access to unique material in a popular collection.

When you take a closer look, digitizing zines becomes a lot more complicated…

Permission- Before posting anything online, the first step is often getting permission from the creator. The authors of zines usually no longer live at the address included in their zine, if they give a name or address at all. Even email isn’t a reliable way to contact people since many zines were created in the pre-internet era, or include old addresses no longer in use.

Copyright- Some zine archives claim that publishing PDF scans of zines online falls under “fair use” for nonprofit educational purposes, and because they usually aren’t hindering anyone’s ability to profit from the publication. To further complicate this question, most zines cut, paste, reprint, borrow, steal, and repurpose images and text from other publications, with or without attribution. According to the Copyright Office: “The distinction between ‘fair use’ and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.”

Privacy- Even though zines are “published” rather than private, like a letter or diary, we have no idea whether 10 copies were made for close friends or 1,000 copies were made and sent far and wide through a zine distributor. They are most often written by young women who never imagined that their deepest secrets and angsty rants would be archived in a research library. One could argue that other digital projects that post diaries and letters of historical significance also violate this right to privacy, but the now-adult women who created these zines are likely to be living, active Internet users whose personal and professional lives could be negatively (or positively) affected by someone else finding their zine online. For example, we have been contacted to remove a last name from our database that was associated with a zine title that the author felt damaged her reputation in her current career—at age 16, she had no idea that the flippant title would ever be available online.

Print culture- This argument for maintaining the print and material nature of zines as opposed to creating digital surrogates is perhaps the weakest of these 4 factors, but it is still a point to consider. Zines are created by hand, crafted with paper, scissors, tape, glue, staples. They were meant to be handed from person to person, physically shared. The experience of handling zines in person, turning each page to reveal intimate secrets, funny comics, and poetry, can’t be duplicated on-line. You would get the content, but miss out on the physical experience, an aspect that is even more important as the medium of communication has shifted to the electronic.

I could write a few more reasons why we are not digitizing our zine collection, just as I could write as many more about why we perhaps should digitize them. Instead I’d rather hear what others have to say on the subject.

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!

The award-winning Historic American Sheet Music Project of the Duke Libraries Digital Collections provides access to images of more than three thousand pieces of early American sheet music. Almost all of this music is popular vocal music intended for voice with piano accompaniment, and virtually none belongs to the genres of classical or concert music, which are also richly represented in the collections of the Duke Libraries. The Classical String Quartet, 1770-1840, begins to explore this area, and makes available the contents of about forty collections from the period when the string quartet was at its peak, when the works of the Viennese masters for the genre were created, many of them unavailable previously in any form since their original publication. Of particular interest are the various arrangements of operas for string quartet, including Joseph and his Brothers by Méhul, and the famous Magic Flute of Mozart. This resource will be highly valuable to scholars of the period, providing primary sources for study, and to string quartets, with a wealth of new repertoire.

The Duke Digital Collections team is excited to announce our newest project: AdViews, a digital archive of vintage television commercials. Our first batch of commercials went live in iTunes U last night (July 20, 2009), and we’ll continue to add thousands of historic commercials to the collection through the rest of 2009. By year’s end, the collection will contain over 10,000 digitized TV commercials from the archives, all available for FREE from Duke’s iTunes U site.

AdViews will provide students, teachers, and researchers access to a wide range of vintage brand advertising from the first four decades of mainstream commercial television. The collection will support interdisciplinary research, not only in marketing and advertising history, but also in visual studies, communication, women’s studies, public health, cultural anthropology, nutrition, technology, and more.

AdViews currently features commercials from the ad agency D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B), a New York advertising firm founded in 1929. The DMB&B archives are held at Duke in the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, a research center in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.

Stay tuned! We’ll be right back with more AdViews updates and behind-the-scenes information…

I’ve been working in academic libraries for fourteen years now, and I still haven’t been able to convince my grandmother that working for a university doesn’t mean you get the summers off.  We certainly haven’t been taking the summer off in the Digital Collections Program here at the Duke University Libraries, even though you haven’t seen most of the results of our summer work yet.

We premiered the Duke Digital Collections iPhone app back in June, which has been getting positive and enthusiastic feedback (thanks!), but otherwise most of our work has been behind-the-scenes stuff that will pay off in the future.  Among our projects:

• The metadata phase of the Broadsides & Ephemera digital collection has begun in earnest, with a team of eight catalogers and archivists using our new metadata editor to describe these rare and valuable resources.

• Work continues on Trident, our digital collections system.  With a new repository, a new metadata editor, and all sorts of other new developments, we’ll be able to create and manage digital collections better, faster, and more seamlessly than ever before, and deliver content in new and exciting ways.

• Our Digital Production Center continues digitizing materials for future collections at a furious rate.  As usual, they’re very speedy and the rest of us sometimes feel like we’re trying to play catch-up with them….

• We’ve introduced new ways to keep up with the Digital Collections Program, including a Facebook page (come be our friend!) and more frequent Twitter updates, where we’ve been tweeting highlights from the Duke Digital Collections since the spring.  We’ve also been posting with our digital collections colleagues from across the state to the North Carolina Digital Collections Collaboratory blog.

• Last but certainly not least, we’re about to launch a huge, fantastic, exciting, FUN new digital collection — hopefully next week — that we’re going to have to keep secret a bit longer.  We hate to tease you … well, maybe we want to tease you a little bit.  It’s completely different from anything we’ve done before in several ways that will become clear when it’s published.  We’ve been working like fiends on this one, but we think it’s totally going to be worth it, and hope you will, too, when you see it.  Stay tuned.

As always, thanks for reading, and for your support and interest.  We hope you’re having as good a summer as we are.  Don’t forget the sunscreen and the frosty beverage of your choice….