Designing the online experience
How can a library catalogue online be designed differently? How do you build different ways of accessing the collection both for online and onsite experiences?
15 Jul 2020
Paula Bray, who leads the State Library of New South Wales’s innovation lab, DX, provided a design brief to design students at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).
Online collection systems are designed for a traditional one-to-one search return. You may get ten results per page, but that might not take you any closer to what you need to find. Libraries work with an accumulation of different cataloguing standards to describe the items that are acquired. Metadata is not always consistently documented, as standards have changed over time.
The brief was to prototype a new online catalogue experience that takes an entirely new approach, rather than the traditional catalogues online, thinking about:
- The collection experienced as a whole, the bird’s eye view approach
- Different formats
- Topics such as time, location, place, author, creator
- Can machine learning methods make it easier to find things, if so how does this metadata get published?
The results provided a range of innovative approaches to discovery and collections experience.