New Site: Item Pages & Data Migration

We’re making good progress on developing our new Digital Collections web application & interface. For the past several weeks, we have focused on three key areas: item display, data modeling, and data migration.

Item Display

Here are some screenshots. What do you think?

Item Page

• Collection context presented at side

Item Options

• Collapsed under a single button to reduce page clutter.

Page-Turning for Paginated Items

• Thumbnail navigation below
• Cycle through item pages without loading new webpages
• Click to zoom on current item page

Item Information (Metadata)

• Long display broken into columns

Comments & Footer

Collection Portal Page (Revised)

• We made some changes to the portal design after our first round of feedback.

Data Models & Data Migration

This less-visible behind-the-scenes part of the project is not as glamorous as page designs, but it is even more challenging and is the true key to building an easy-to-use website. Behind every good resource discovery interface is a foundation of well-organized, interoperable data.

Our new application requires us to move (migrate) the vast amount of data from our existing site and make changes to the way the data is structured. Our Metadata Advisory Group has provided helpful direction for changes to data models. Over the past several weeks, we have migrated data for almost all of our advertising & photograph collections, as well as Historic American Sheet Music.

Look for project updates every couple weeks. As always, your feedback is welcome and will help us to make this system great.