NYPL Shared Resource Collection

An image of the NYPL Discovery full record result.

The NYPL Shared Collection is an interface to search the catalogs of NYPL, Columbia, and Princeton Universities. Designed to decrease friction, ReCap, as it is known, allows for the sharing of items across institutions. My primary role was increasing readability and usability as well as meeting WCAG 2.0 Accessibility standards. It also served as a test case for the Design Toolkit.

Much of our research indicated that our users would access the application from a variety of devices. All of the application's various states and layouts are composed from components described by the NYPL Design Toolkit

an image of the a full record screen — The full item screen contains all relevant details a researcher might need to know about a given item.

an image of the filtering tool active — The filters are functionally independent of Javascript, as well as keyboard and screen reader accessible.

To ensure each page rendered correctly, we opted to use system fonts instead of the custom NYPL typeface. An additional benefit would be that we would not be overtaxing our user's devices or data plans. In the cases where we do use a custom typeface, we restricted the number of characters to the upper and lower case Roman alphabet with the knowledge that we would not need punctuation, numerals, or other special characters.