What’s In The Library?Prototyping the future of digital collections
Designing for Digital 2016Jenn Phillips-Bacher / @MrsAudiacWeb Manager @wellcomelibrary
SURPRISE!!
2012 Redesign
• Cover-to-cover viewer
• Curated editorial content
• Catalogue discovery
What went wrong?
“Keyword search is ungenerous: it demands a query, discourages exploration, and withholds more than it provides.”- Mitchell Whitelaw @mtchl
The problem spaceWeek 1 : ScopeHow much and what is in the library catalogue?Week 2 : Showing the ThingWhat do you have on Topic X?Week 3 : ContextAs editors, how can we mix our own editorial content with another content provider, like Wikipedia? Week 4 : ScalabilityHow can we provide context on a large scale?
What we made
Image showing week 1
Monkey years!
Image showing week 2
Big long lists
What difference has it made?
• Collection development
• Bibliographic description
• Library systems• Web
development teams
Alpha Testing January 2016
“This doesn’t look like a library website.”
Coming soon:
More testingMore data
What can your collections tell you about themselves?
THANK YOU!
What’s In the Library? http://whatsinthelibrary.comhttp://whatsinthelibrary.wordpress.com https://alpha.wellcomelibrary.org
Mitchell Whitelaw. “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections”. Digital Humanities Quarterly (2015). Volume 9 Number 1. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/1/000205/000205.html
Jenn Phillips-Bacher / @MrsAudiac / @wellcomelibrary