@Fran - Thanks! Sharing our design process on our blog has been beneficial to us, too. It has also been nice to try out some new tools--Notable and Mockingbird--to help communicate our work. For usability testing, we're fortunate to have a new usability lab here in the library with Morae software. We'll be putting that to good use for our project in early 2010.

We're hoping to make our 'Browse by' options obvious and prominent on every page and are glad to hear feedback on where to best put those links.

With the collection info, our challenge is to give some context for the item--especially for visitors who arrive directly at the item page--without competing too much for real estate with the item itself.

@Audra - Thank you. That's a good point: C does make it clearer whether an item has been commented on--whether on our site or elsewhere. That section gains prominence by pushing the collection information down slightly.

@Debra - Thanks. I think A is most similar in structure to our current layout and is the most minimalist approach of the four. The D mockup frees up space to the right at the expense of putting more info and context above the item.