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

Abstract

A team from the Human–Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) at the University of Maryland worked with a team of the Library of Congress (LC) to develop and test interface designs for LC's National Digital Library Program (NDLP). The goal of the collaboration was to establish a user-centered design team for the NDLP, to create interface prototype that serve a wide range of users, and to develop a variety of tools and widgets that LC may incorporate into future implementations. A design objective for the LC project was to apply dynamic query and query preview techniques to make browsing and searching easy for LC NDLP easy and effective. The chapter describes the three iterations that 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. The chapter discusses the issues and resolutions for each iteration and reflect the challenges of incomplete metadata, data visualization, and the rapidly changing web environment.