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