NYPL Labs

German Stowaway Subcrew Skateboarder (via Lucius Young’s photostream)
Original NYPL photo (on Flickr)
See more remixes from across the Flickr Commons in the Commons Discussion group thread, Re-mix! Mashing up the Commons your way…
On a somewhat related note, tonight’s sold-out “Live from the NYPL” event (co-sponsored by WIRED) with Lawrence Lessig, Shepard Fairey and others looks like [...]

In reading a recent article about the Interactive Technologies Group at the New York Times, I couldn’t help being struck by how many parallels one might make to similar issues confronting our cultural-memory organizations (libraries, archives, museums).
This passage (excerpted) in particular jumped out:
The proposal was to create a newsroom: a group of developers-slash-journalists, or journalists-slash-developers, [...]

Metrics dashboards are great but sometimes can be misleading if you’re not digging any deeper. As a great illustration of this, when recently checking Digital Gallery’s traffic I was surprised to see, before opening the full report, that in the overall NYPL dashboard (Google Analytics) our traffic was down 13% this month over [...]

Last summer a talented colleague, Mark Matienzo, previewed a skunkworks project that he’d been working on at an NYPL DEG presentation. From what I can remember, it involved a Wordpress theme for connecting the oral histories of eminent physicists with archival and current commentary by other physicists. Or something like that. [...]

Having first broached the idea to refresh the Digital Gallery’s interface over 9 months ago, the journey toward a site-wide redesign has overturned a number of my assumptions. As we prepare to leave preview mode and make the redesign the design, some of the lessons I’ve learned (or had to relearn) in this process [...]

There are over 58,000 subject headings in the NYPL Digital Gallery. Recently I started to think again about what I call subject-fatigue: imagine, for example, a user who wants to browse for “all the stuff you’ve got about theater exteriors in New York City” confronted by an alphabetical list of 58,000 subjects.

One approach [...]

We have been trying to nail down the broad categories that will comprise the top-navigation labels in the Digital Gallery’s latest redesign. Our goal has been to make these as user-centered and jargon-free as possible. It’s becoming clear, however, that we are running into a semantic conundrum – which others have noted – that [...]

I’ve said before that trying to build a large site with both a friendly learning curve and the tools to reward returning “power users” is a far from trivial task. In a recent A List Apart article (Designing for Flow), Jim Ramsey says this much better than I’ve ever been able to. Takeaway? [...]

Roy Tennant has recently pointed out some usability problems that can arise when linking to digitized books through OPAC systems. In the New York Public Library’s case, links to Google books are being handled in the catalog by the addition of what looks like a “Google record” – one for each (electronic format) [...]

The New York Public Library’s digital images are now available as editable clips through the beta site for Kaltura, a new, collaborative Web video platform. This development – made possible via a JSON feed (documentation on the API coming soon) from the Digital Gallery – has the potential to redefine the way in which [...]