As we continue to develop our new discovery system/site for Digital Collections (codename Tripod2), dealing with format complexity is one of our biggest challenges.

One of the library’s major strategic goals is to “increase the Libraries’ capacity to create, acquire, and manage digital scholarly content in an increasingly diverse range of formats.”  We’re doing our part.

Many resource discovery sites have to handle only a single item format. YouTube deals with videos. That’s pretty much it. And it deals with them very, very well. But within our collections, we have a mixed bag:

• single-page image-centric objects (e.g., photographs or printed ads)
• single-page text-centric objects with images (e.g., song lyric sheets or broadsides)
• items with pagination (e.g., sheet music)
• books comprised of hundreds of pages with accompanying text
• PDF documents
• digital videos
• albums comprised of a series of videos
• …and more formats on the horizon.

To complicate things further, some of our objects are hosted here at Duke on our servers, but some of them are elsewhere (YouTube, the Internet Archive, iTunes, Flickr, etc.).

We’re aiming to make these items all easily discoverable in our site and to present the best possible interaction options for each of the various item types you will find in the system.

Here’s a sneak peek at how some of our various resources will be presented.  The screen shots are from our actual web application (previous previews have been from mockups):

Single Image

• options button above, item info below

Page With Text

Continue reading An increasingly diverse range of formats →

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

Continue reading New Site: Item Pages & Data Migration →

Here’s a first look at the new design for our Digital Collections site! Based on the blueprints from our initial wireframes, these designs include fully fleshed out HTML, CSS, images, and Javascript.

These designs focus on what we’re calling ‘portals’: useful starting pages for researchers to explore particular groups of items. These can be homepages to individual digital collections, or portals to groups of items from various collections.

We hosted a discussion session among library staff last week. I’ll capture the conversation from that session in the comments section of this post.

Mockups

Features

Branding & Navigation

Continue reading Mockups for our New Interface →

At long last, here’s the final group of wireframes we’ll blog about for our site redesign project: the individual collection homepages. Here’s an annotated look at one of our current collection homepages:

View this feedback (Collection Homepage – Current Site) on Notable

Prototypes

Here are six possibilities (A – F). We’ve used Ad*Access as an example, as it is our most-visited collection:

Analysis

The ideas in the prototypes stem from our analysis of the current site, per the following:
Continue reading Collection Homepages: Prototypes, Analysis, & Inspiration →

We’d like to share some of our ideas for the future portal page to Duke Digital Collections. We have included highlights from user feedback that draw attention to important navigation elements, as well as examples of websites that have informed these designs. Please let us know what you think!

Prototypes

You can review our five initial prototypes (A through E) here.

Emphasis has been placed on ways to ease navigation by providing clear, easy ways to browse and prominently displaying visual content that highlights an assortment of interesting materials from our collections.

Analysis

We’ve uncovered several important requirements for the new portal page through the variety of research methods we employed:
Continue reading Portal Page: Prototypes, Analysis & Inspiration →

We have learned a lot about how to improve our item pages and we’ve gathered great examples from around the web as inspiration.  We’re now ready to share some wireframe prototypes.

There are four different wireframe prototypes here. Use the ‘Jump To’ section at the top to look at versions A, B, C, and D.  Preferences? Ideas? Concerns? Questions? Let us know what you think!

In addition to incorporating the feedback and ideas we’ve gathered so far, here are a few additional key things these designs attempt to address:
Continue reading Item Pages – Prototypes →