I have been working with Kyle, Leigh, and Annie Benefiel for the past few months redesigning the UL Digital Collections website. We’re happy to say that the new design launched last week!

The University Libraries has an extensive digital collections website that allows researches to access digitized and born-digital content across a wide range of collections. We last redesigned the digital collections website in 2016, when mobile usage was quite low and the number of collections was half what it is now. In the intervening years, Kyle had built out a much more robust search tool, but the search results page did not play nicely with mobile browsers.

Annie and Leigh had several design goals:

  • Expandable/collapsible facet menus on search results screens
  • Adjust size of item thumbnails and improve overall usage of screen real estate<
  • Improve mobile search results layout
  • Investigate implementing a search bar that combines searches in different repositories/lets user select which repository (Omeka, ArchivesSpace, ScholarWorks, Folio) or search all.

Working with the software that runs our Digital Collections, Omeka Classic, I drew out mockups of what different pages would appear like on different devices using an online collaborative design tool called Figma. Once we had the look, feel, and user interactions mapped out, I began rewriting the custom theme I had built for Omeka back in 2016. I also updated the theme files in Kyle’s customized SolrSearch plugin, as well as the views for a few other plugins we use consistently.

To build out the redesign, Kyle set up a staging server with Omeka and a copy of most of our data. That allowed us to make changes but interact with the site as if it were the live version. I worked on updating templates and stylesheets, and kept the rest of the team in the loop by sending them links to the staging server. Once we had tested the site extensively and fixed issues that had come up, we decided to quietly push the new design live.

Meanwhile, Kyle built a new search tool that allows users to search our different archival and special collections tools from a single search box. It is live now, although the Rare Books search is not working as expected, so we’ll be adjusting that throughout the week.

Let us know what you think! And as always, you can use the Report a Problem link on any page to report issues or glitches.