TechLabs

We are proud to share a major redesign we have completed (or 95% completed) of our Digital Library. This is a full HTML & CSS facelift with additional features to come in the future.

Have a look: http://digital.library.villanova.edu

While some of you may not be familiar with the old design, what we are especially happy with in this process is how the new design better illuminates the hierarchical data structure and creates a new separation between the act of browsing documents and the act of viewing a document.

A little about our DigLib: The site is currently running on a system written by Andrew Nagy in PHP with an eXist XML database. In the near future we will be running our documents through a server-side OCR process and indexing the full-text of the documents, converting Tiffs to JPEG2000 to create a better zoom feature, and doing more with dynamic PDF creation. Even further into the future we will be exploring the possibility of putting our software out as an open source package.

We still have lots to do, but I would love to have any feedback.