Cutting Edge Digitization Tooling
My Role
Lead Full Stack Developer, UX Designer
Related Skills
Figma, React, Node.js, Electron, Vite, Chakra UI
The Brief
Through insightful conversations with our digitizers, we discovered a strong desire among galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) employees for enhanced collaboration, streamlined accessibility, and seamless content sharing across heritage collections. This project was initiated to transform the digitization process, empowering curators, archivists, and librarians to work together more effectively. Our initiative aimed to promote common data standards for GLAM institutions across Canada, facilitating content sharing between different organizations. By enabling institutions to save and share manifests directly from International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) systems, we significantly improved the efficiency of content distribution and fostered greater engagement with cultural heritage resources. Additionally, we aimed to develop a new access workflow that would be decoupled from our intricate preservation pipeline. This restructuring sought to create a more efficient and less computationally demanding method for delivering content online.
The Solution
So, what did I do?
Develop personas
First, I interviewed our digitization staff, and staff within similar organizations, and summarized my findings into user personas. These user personas helped my team and I understand the domain of our end users, and what their perspectives and priorities were.
Map the user journey
After having a good understanding of the people we would be building the solution for, we invited them to a workshop which I facilitated. During this work shop, we outlined their current workflows, and looked for opportunities to improve them. After a few more sessions, we had established an ideal workflow for our new digitization tooling. As part of this stage, I did a landscape analysis to find any existing open source tools that could help us achieve their goals sooner. This resulted in my finding the Digirati Manifest Editor, which was determined to be extremely user friendly through some user testing with our staff. It also already took care of some of the main features we needed, meaning I would only have to focus my efforts on higher level workflow functionality. Better yet, I could import the editor into a React application!
Design the prototype
After determining what ideas were both feasible and highly effective, I got to work sketching my ideas out on paper to share with the digitization staff at work. Using their feedback, I iterated on the design quickly at this stage.
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Plan the system requirements
With the desired workflow, some open source resources, and the rough design ready, I then created a project plan for the development work that would need to be done.
Develop the solution
Throughout the course of two sprints, I created a app with Electron, a framework that allows developers to create desktop applications using Node.js. I packaged it up and deployed it with guides I created with a helpful tutorial creator called Scribe. After some rounds of testing and iteration, the app design was further refined and was ready to be used in production!
Launch the new workflow
The digitization staff were given instructions on how to download the app and install it onto their machines. More guides were created on Scribe for all of the workflows outlined in the initial workshop. Using this tool, we are now planning collaboration projects between Canadiana and the Internet Archive Canada!
