Bringing Treasures to the Surface: Iterative Design for the Library of Congress National Digital Library Program

Abstract

The Human-Computer Interaction Lab worked with a team for the Library of Congress (LC) to develop and test interface designs for LC's National Digital Library Program. Three iterations are described and illustrate the progression of the project toward a compact design that minimizes scrolling and jumping and anchors users in a screen space that tightly couples search and results. Issues and resolutions are discussed for each iteration and reflect the challenges of incomplete metadata, data visualization, and the rapidly changing web environment.

The evolution of the international children's digital library searching and browsing interface

“…We followed the advice of Plaisant et al [23] to bring the "treasures" of the library to the surface by having books appear on the same page with the search tools. We chose to place the books in the middle of the page, rather than having categories on one side and result on the other, as is common in other interfaces, for two reasons.…”

Immediate usability: a case study of public access design for a community photo library

“…These are based on our experience on PhotoFinder Kiosk and other projects such as the Library of Congress (LOC) National Digital Library Program (Marchionini et al, 1998;Plaisant et al, 1996), the LOC Online Public Access Catalog (Marchionini et al, 1993), and the Smithsonian's Guide to Opportunities in Volunteer Archeology (Plaisant, 1990).…”

Current State of Digital Reference in Primary and Secondary Education

“…Alternatively, they may start with a high-level classification of content and systematically navigate through smaller sets to candidate objects. Although there is good progress in creating dynamic query interfaces [17,19] that closely couple the query and navigation tactics so that people can quickly and easily explore DLs, the need for reference librarian assistance remains a significant challenge in DLs.…”