Western Carolina University

The Southern Appalachian Digitial Collections Partnership is committed to building regionally oriented, historically significant collections of broad cultural and research interest, currently containing over 25,000 records of historical and regional significance.

The Partnership needed to provide a strong digital infrastructure in order to extend online access to unique resource materials of the natural and cultural history of the Southern Appalachian region.

We lead the design and oversaw the production of their new digital platform, aiming to communicate the breadth of content available through narrative-led content in online exhibitions, as well as strong search and filtering functionalities.

Enabling audiences to configure their results by searching for records by collection, creator, decade, location, medium, source, subject and type.

We workshopped with WCU staff to discover the most content-rich and data-driven fields to search for to bring the most useful results, where they can refine their results and sort the order to rearrange the list.

Number of results is displayed to indicate the records fitting users criteria at a glance. Users can also switch between grid views focusing on images, and list views focusing on details.

Using the search box will display autocomplete suggestions based on the users input keywords to help guide their searches and increase discoverability and decrease the chance of misspelling.

The collaborative project between Western Carolina University and University of North Carolina Asheville was pivotal to the integrations and cross-connections between records.

Users could choose to focus on a specific collection from the list of 30+ available, each collection focuses on a specific subject, culture or location, and were accessioned over many years by different institutions.

Ensuring cross-platform accessibility, the website is fully responsive and includes unique behaviour and layouts for hand-held devices to cater to users across the globe.

Templates are made compact and filters are collapsed to help audiences focus on the content of the page, while still maintaining the same level of functionality.

Records have varying levels and complexities of data depending on quality of accession. The interface is kept refined and simple, collapsing key data into sections for easy sifting.

The notion of 'compound records' meant that one record could exist as part of a 'set', meaning it is a 'child' item, and an item could also be a 'parent' level meaning it is made of component parts, this was communicated clearly in the interface to help users understand the contexts of the records.