Refreshing the John Carter Brown Library’s Web Presence for Non-Academic Audiences
summary
Case study of a site redesign that turns an arcane early-America collection into a browse-first experience built on Drupal 8 with heavy use of paragraphs-driven layout, Views and custom code for exhibitions and navigation. Research yields 139 survey respondents and nine personas that push the site to prioritize discovery over catalog-first research. Features include a collection carousel, URL-parameter back-navigation to preserve browse context, curated high-resolution photography, and a modular architecture that ships now and lets the team postpone deep catalog integration and native translation for later.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:46About Message Agency
- 1:27The Challenge
- 5:02New Leadership
- 6:47Key Strategies
- 10:51User personas
- 15:19Technical approach
- 16:37Story Bands
- 17:55Collection Highlights
- 21:17Collections Taxonomy
- 24:03Exhibitions
- 25:28Carousel
- 27:43Lessons Learned
- 30:25Questions
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