Please (provided you are behind the firewall and a staff member at NYPL) attempt to break this: q.nypl.org.
Based on several interviews and some user testing conducted by Michael Lascarides, Trevor Thornton put together a redesigned mockup of the first Labs Q Web application. Today, I finished implementing all the suggested changes, and now the site [...]
More is more. 750,000 images is a lot of images, each nestled in a rich bed of additional data. So when it came time to build an internal application to search all of these images (published to our public gallery or not), it was obvious: Somewhere, we were going to need an index.
Since the application [...]
Next week the project known as ‘Q’ enters its user-testing phase. Once again, I am reminded a lot of the Paul Valéry quote that “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Valéry’s statement is as true for Web applications as it is for poems (if you believe in such a distinction). Q (short for [...]
Its been some time now since the book “Design Patterns” by Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides (the so called Gang of Four) was first published, in 1994.
Consequently, one need not necessarily be both brilliant and original simultaneously to recognize that screen to screen navigation, the flow of control through applications , [...]
Recently, we decided to test out a third-party software tool — in one sense to see if it could work as a quick and easy way of implementing a Digital Work Request System (which had been being built in Ruby on Rails, which is waiting for a new server to call home), and in another [...]
There’s a fog of “user”-centered thoughts clouding the collective head space of the library community, and I find it betrays a counterproductive contradiction: While the aim is clearly to, in some way or another, bring our systems more in line with what the “user” wants or needs, when we call someone a “user” of a [...]
One week later, and we have some code and some documentation that is already getting revised. What started as a simple form has started to bloom into a far larger project. The work request system as it was previously understood (see documentation on the Labs wiki) has overlapped significantly with the Dashboard cataloging interface that [...]
Anyone working on the development side of our database should know, and know well, how the database is structured; catalogers, however, should not be forced into such a relationship with Oracle. In deploying the next interface, it is paramount that we find a way to force the intricacies of the database into the background in [...]
