We continue to make a great deal of progress in creating the Library Services Platform which will play a vital role in the Discovery Redesign Project, in addition to the Website Redesign and Special Collections projects.
During the second quarter of 2017, the team focused on building what we’re calling the Lexicon. The general idea is to gather all the information the library already provides and making it, not just searchable, but more importantly, findable and valuable.
Lexicon Building
Essentially, the Lexicon is a kind of universal translator that allows the Libraries to create and process requests against a wide range of data about library services (bibliographic data, library hours, etc.) using a common language. These common language elements create bridges, or connection points among these pools of data, and free us from the restrictions of a particular service or vendor. The Libraries IT staff can then focus on developing methods to dynamically generate pages of meaningful content.
As stated in the AD&S 3rd Quarter Plan, “for the Discovery system we are going to be evaluating and improving the relevance of the search results, and building a more advanced user interface for the search.” Robyn Ness, Meris Mandernach and the UX Cohorts have held usability testing sessions with paper mockups and gathered some important information. But we are excited to soon be able to share the Discovery proof-of-concept with various functional experts. Based on their feedback, we will make targeted improvements to the indexing and weighting of results.
In an upcoming post, we’ll examine the initial wireframes on which the interface will be based. Stay tuned!
