NYPL Labs

A few months ago, Anthony J. Zinni of Positive Space took to task projects that continue to claim “beta” long after it should be in alpha, and/or to seem cool and cutting-edge. (As though unfinished is the new finished. How art school.) I took particular notice of his article, and started thinking about the Digital Gallery. Although we’re about to take the Digital Gallery out of beta and replace the old design with the new, we still think of this site as a work in progress. Does that mean we’re making the “perpetual beta” faux pas?

Speaking of art, Leonardo da Vinci said “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” I’m sure someone has also said you don’t finish a website, you just stop working on it. We’ve had more than one meeting here which started as a launch plan, and ended with another to-do list. As anxious as we are to present our new design, those to-do lists have included important changes that, I believe, made the extra development time worth it.

For one, we’ve completely revamped the home page. We think the revised layout will make the difference between “searching” and “browsing” much clearer. We’ve also refined the display and nomenclature of the image discovery paths linked from the image detail page.

I joke that there should be a little bird in the office chirping “Beta! Beta!” as a reminder—not that we can leave something for later, but that our projects (and perhaps any web-deployed system) are always evolving and improving, and it’s ok to think of them that way. We do have to reach a stopping point and release the darn thing, but we always have an eye towards future development. So I’d like to think that as perpetual as the Digital Gallery “Beta” might seem, its continuing evolution exists to provide our users with the newest and best innovations.

At any rate, the Digital Gallery stopping point is almost upon us. You’ll be the first to know.