[Web4lib] Digital Library Redesign

[Chris Barr]

Hello group,

I just wanted to share with everyone a major redesign we have completed 
(or 95% completed) on our Digital Library. This is a full HTML & CSS 
facelift with additional features to come in the future.

http://digital.library.villanova.edu

While most of you will not have seen the old design, what I am 
especially happy with in this process is how the new design better 
illuminates the hierarchical data structure and created a new separation 
between the act of browsing documents and the act of viewing a document.

A little about our DigLib: The site is currently running on a system 
written by Andrew Nagy in PHP with an eXist XML database. In the near 
future we will be running our documents through a server-side OCR 
process and indexing the full-text of the documents, converting Tiffs to 
JPEG2000 to create a better zoom feature, and doing more with dynamic 
PDF creation. Even further into the future we will be exploring the 
possibility of putting our software out as an open source package.

Still have lots to do, but I would love to have any feedback from the 
community.


Best,
Chris Barr
Interface and Design Specialist
Falvey Memorial Library
Villanova University
(610) 519-9254