Institutional repositories are an increasingly important part of universities’ strategies for access and preservation, both for institutionally produced knowledge such as faculty research, and for locally housed rare and unique collections. Much attention is devoted to metadata profiles and long-term preservation auditing, but the question of the user experience has been under-addressed, leading in many cases to repositories that do a reasonable job at preservation, but an inadequate job at access.
At the same time, online library catalogues are famously difficult to use and lag far behind users’ expectations for web applications and standards of findability. The “next generation library catalog” movement has created both commercial and open source offerings, and many university libraries are currently evaluating these and deciding on next steps.
At the University of Virginia Library, we are attempting to solve both of these problems with a unified approach. Blacklight, an open source project started at the University of Virginia Library but now supported by a thriving open source community, provides a unified discovery interface for physical collections traditionally searched via a library catalogue, and digital collections traditionally searched by an institutional repository. Making these collections discoverable via a single interface provides a dramatically improved user experience, but also poses unique challenges. This talk will discuss an overview of the software, our design strategy, some of our usability findings and challenges, and future plans. The emphasis will be on providing a joyous information discovery experience for users, and our attempts to replicate the serendipity of browsing library stacks.
