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Off the top of my head, in addition to NYPL, I would look at

University of British Columbia’s Open Collections site

https://open.library.ubc.ca/

See this release announcement from Paul Joseph about features & APIs:
https:[log in to unmask]

the World Digital Library
https://www.wdl.org/en/
see also the APIs page: http://api.wdl.org/


Both of these sites strike me as exemplary for putting as much thought into the APIs as they do their front ends. And both support IIIF, the International Image Interoperability Framework<http://iiif.io>  and its APIs. If you are serving digital collections, please (PLEASE!) consider also supporting IIIF’s 2.x APIs.

You might also be interested in Blacklight<http://projectblacklight.org/>, and its digital collections / exhibits plug-in Spotlight<http://spotlight.projectblacklight.org/>. Blacklight is open source, responsive, and can include a number of add ons / APIs, like <https://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight/wiki/Blacklight-Add-ons> OAI-PMH<https://github.com/cbeer/blacklight_oai_provider>, SiteMaps, oEmbed, and Map views. It has hundreds of instances worldwide, and is used for a variety of purposes, including catalogs, digital repository front-ends, presentation of digital collections, and a front-end to Hydra<https://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight/wiki/Examples>.

Spotlight is an extension of Blacklight, and provides curators and collection managers with a self-service UI for building a digital collection showcase. It adds context, order, narrative and customizable search, facets and display fields to a digital collection site through a WYSIWG UI. Some Spotlight sites can be found at Stanford’s exhibits page: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/

I look forward to seeing UNT’s new Texas Portal; they do good work. (No pressure, Mark :)

- Tom





On Feb 27, 2016, at 1:26 PM, Matt Sherman <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:

Hi all,

I am asking about interesting digital collection tech due to some personal
research I am doing.  I have looked a bunch of digital collection sites
lately and outside of NYPL <http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/>, I have
mostly seen bland, non-responsive but functional CONTENTdm sites or old
late 90s early 2000s static HTML exhibit sites.  Given the kind of web
tools and UX methods we have now I am curious if people can point me to, or
tell me about, more interesting user friendly designs/systems?  I see talk
of responsive design and data interoperability via OAI-PMH and APIs, but I
must be looking in the wrong places as I am seeing very little evidence of
it being put into action.  If anyone can point me to more interesting
pastures I would appreciate it.

Matt Sherman