As a member of the small but mighty ArchiveGrid team, it’s my happy job to bring you a few updated on what has been happening with our sandbox discovery service for archival descriptions. Today I wanted to tell you about some updates to the system architecture and also a bit about how we are trying to understand how users interact with ArchiveGrid.
As Bruce wrote over at the ArchiveGrid blog, we’ve shifted over to the Bootstrap Framework. Bootstrap brings with it “responsive design,” which allows us to accommodate a broader variety of devices including phones and tablets) and added more access points to the MARC records from WorldCat (which accounts for 90% of the ArchiveGrid content).
We introduced more access points because we wanted to allow users more ways to flow to and find other items of interest without having to type in a new search. In order to see if this system change is having any impact, we’re using click trail heat maps; early comparisions of before and after show that there is a change in the system. For more details, head over to the ArchiveGrid blog, where Bruce writes about this topic. We’ll be revisiting this analysis so stay tuned!
In general, if you are interested in the nuts and bolts of building a system optimized for archival discovery, you’ll find the ArchiveGrid blog useful, and I commend it to you. Especially check out the postings categorized under Building ArchiveGrid.
Merrilee Proffitt is Senior Manager for the OCLC RLP. She provides community development skills and expert support to institutions within the OCLC Research Library Partnership.
You’ve got the perfect person to write that blog too in Ellen 🙂 Exciting to see all the developments with AG