As information design visionary Edward Tufte has said, clutter is a failure of design, not an attribute of information. The goals for the latest version of this site were to try to make the Digital Gallery's design visually intuitive, direct, bright and lucid. We wanted to provide a clear answer to the question, "what can I do here?" In this version the site's easy-to-use functionality remains largely the same. But there is more whitespace and less clutter. There are more customizable options and fewer popup windows. If you are a returning user, hopefully some of the changes we've made will improve your experience in searching and exploring this site.
Most monitors aren't 800 pixels wide anymore, and this site isn't either. The frame has been widened and centered to expose more information, especially on larger screen resolutions.
We're not using tables. Anywhere. Digital Gallery page layouts are now 100% CSS-driven. By not tying the presentation data to tables, we'll have more flexibility in future versions to display the site's content on a variety of devices like PDAs and mobile phones.
The Digital Gallery is an image database (640,000 images and growing), and the home page design reflects this by focusing on the Gallery pick, search box and browsing options. New images will be highlighted weekly, revealing the diversity - across subjects, countries and historical eras - of the New York Public Library's collections.
The idea behind the redesigned item-view pages began with the notion that users might arrive at a page that displays just the image, the caption and some basic controls (resize, select and so on): a "workspace" where you can interact with an image in different ways.
Choices in the item-view are now arranged according to the things you might want to DO:
The Digital Gallery holds a large number of collections and source titles, over 80 collections and 25,000 titles at last count. Navigating these hierarchical lists can be daunting for most users, but some changes have been made to try to address this problem. The total number of digital items is now displayed with a clear link to "view all images" for each branch of a "title-tree." And as you navigate through collections, a random image sample from the current list of titles is displayed: it's another entry point and provides an example of the type of image that might exist within a source or collection.
You can set the number of images to display on your results pages, and the starting size of item-view images (medium - 300 pixels, or large - 760 px). You can also choose whether image-detail information appears by default on item-view pages. Any of these options can be changed by clicking the "change display" link accessible from every page.
Digital Gallery has added support for a browser extension (add-on) which provides a new way of browsing through sets of images. For users, the effect is close to seamless integration of a truly immersive image-browsing experience from within their web browser. Sites such as Flickr and Google Image Search also support the CoolIris (formerly known as PicLens) extension. The browser add-on is free, works on both Internet Explorer and Firefox, and can be downloaded here. Once the extension is added to your browser, you can view any image search in the Digital Gallery as an immersive slideshow with one easy click.
Image metadata (in the Dublin Core format) is now embedded in each item page. This allows Digital Gallery records to be easily exported to web applications like the citation management tool Zotero or to any other application which can read embedded metadata.
We are planning better search algorithms and browse options, RSS feeds of images, more options for saving selections beyond your own computer, the ability to automatically email images and other improvements. NYPL Labs will also be developing APIs to Digital Gallery content that will allow creative re-uses outside of this site or even the browser.
This redesign is a work in progress. The original interface will remain accessible for a period of time for those users who wish to more gradually become accustomed to the new design's features. Please fill out our online survey to let us know what you like and what you don't, what works and what doesn't. Your opinions will directly inform this site's design in future versions.