Item Pages: Inspiring Sites

"Who knows, perhaps you may inspire poetry." Ad*Access. Item BH1517.

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.

View this feedback (Item Page – Flickr) on Notable

View this feedback (Item Page Example – ECU) on Notable

View this feedback (Item Page Example – Brooklyn Museum) on Notable

View this feedback (Item Page Example – World Digital Library) on Notable

View this feedback (Item Page Example – Duke Library Catalog) on Notable

View this feedback (Item Page Example – NLA Trove) on Notable

View this feedback (Item Page Example – YouTube) on Notable

View this feedback (Item Page Example – Amazon) on Notable

View this feedback (Item Page Example – Worldcat) on Notable

View this feedback (Item Page Example – UBdigit) on Notable

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

3 thoughts on “Item Pages: Inspiring Sites”

  1. I’m partial but I like what we have done with the Portal to Texas History at the University of North Texas. We just did another release of the user interface after our first round of usability testing. The site is http://texashistory.unt.edu/ I would suggest looking at books and/or newspapers.

  2. Thanks for the heads-up, Mark (and excellent job at last year’s LITA forum, btw). We’ll definitely add your site to our list. It looks great–you’ve got a nice clean interface. I especially like the Flickr-esque ‘all image sizes’ option combined with the page turner.

  3. I wonder if the makers of Mad Men used that ad to help dream up the character of Betty Draper.

Comments are closed.