About a year ago, I stepped into a newly created role, Director of Digital Experience at The New York Public Library. The position came with an exciting and challenging charge: to transform how the Library creates digital experiences in both virtual and physical spaces, across programs, collections, and events throughout the institution. As a new department in the Library, we embarked on a new and exciting series of initiatives that includes the integration of digital experiences into our exhibition programs, working with the various educational programs to understand how we can better develop educational resources for the community, and our most immediate challenge, the redevelopment of the Library’s website.

You are reading this piece on nypl.org right now—so obviously, you use the Library’s website, which puts you in the category of “a lot of people.” As with so many organizations, corporations and institutions, the website is a key point of contact for many of our patrons. According to Mary Meeker’s presentation at this year's Code Conference, Internet usage since 1995 has grown worldwide from 35 million users to 2.8 billion, and from 1% to 39% population penetration. Locally, nationally, and globally, nypl.org serves millions of people per year who visit the website to see if a branch is open, put a hold on a book, find out who is speaking at Books at Noon, or when the next Photoshop class is being offered. Scholars, researchers, teachers and students explore our collection of databases, articles and other online resources. You can even see recorded events that have taken place at the Library—like our amazing LIVE from the NYPL series or Books at Noon program.

The Library’s website has grown since its original launch over 20 years ago. More and more information, programming and media has be integrated into the site. The site has become more complex, and being able to discover all the amazing things in The New York Public Library is getting more and more difficult to do on the site. We’ve also come to realize that many of the new technologies that can allow us to connect with communities, create a dialog with our experts and patrons, and make use of new interactive tools is becoming harder and harder to integrate into our aging technical infrastructure.

It’s time for an upgrade!

While there’s a great number of resources on the site, we know we can make it better. We can make it easier to find things. We can offer you the opportunity to connect to communities and resources here at the library. We can offer you more access to our fantastic staff, our collections and our expertise. We can make it easier to attend a class, a lecture or ask a librarian a question. We can create a more personal experience and help you get the most out of this great community institution. We want to make the site easier to use, and easier to access, if you are looking at it on a desktop computer, tablet or smartphone.

In order to do that, we need to rebuild, redesign, and reorganize. We’ve launched a web redevelopment project that will take us into next year and allow us to begin offering new interfaces, new online tools, and new ways for you to interact with NYPL.  You’ll start seeing some of these changes later this fall as we really begin to roll up our sleeves and start building the new digital platform. There’s a great deal to do, with much needed re-tooling of the backend site structure as part of this initial effort, so many of the changes may not be immediately apparent.

We've just completed a 12-week concept phase of the redevelopment of the site. Working with the Portland, Oregon design firm Second Story, we kicked off the phase with a high-intensity boot-camp week of interviews with library departments and staff aimed at assessing everyone’s needs, and we’ve kept everyone at NYPL as involved as possible as the project has progressed. We completed an inventory of all our web content—and there is quite a lot—and created a series of visual designs to establish a design direction after receiving feedback from across our 92 branches. In addition, we began an assessment of the site's infrastructure and began exploring how new web technologies could be integrated into the new environment. Our vision for the site’s rollout is a continuation of the process. Parts of the site will be available in its first appearance while others will be developed in tandem. And even after the whole thing is “complete,” it still won’t be “done.” NYPL is always re-evaluating what it can provide for the public, and our approach to the new website will follow this philosophy.

At this time, the culmination of the concept phase, we’ve developed an initial visual treatment, not a final design, but a general visual direction that incorporates some of the new features and ideas we’ve been discussing. This is a small representation of a much larger design scope, but I’d like to share it with you to give you an idea of some of the potential changes and features we might develop further. Click the video below to see some samples:

Over the next few months we'll be posting our progress on the overall project, soliciting your input, and introducing you to the team that is making this happen. For starters, I’d like to offer the following email address:

webfeedback@nypl.org

If you have any thoughts, ideas, or features you think we should consider, feel free to send me a note and let me know what you are thinking. I’ll definitely read them and consider your feedback as we move through the process of this web redevelopment.

I’ve invited members of the Digital Experience group to contribute to this blog as well. In the coming months, you’ll hear from people who are helping to reshape the cornerstone of the Library’s digital platform. We hope this window into the design of the new website is interesting and exciting to you as it is to us, and please feel free to drop us a line to let us know how we are doing.