Caltech Library Website
(and Other Collaborations)
Under the auspices of my writing consultation enterprise, Chris Daley Writing & Design, I do the work of digital humanities regularly, even if it’s not necessarily under the umbrella of academia. I collaborate with writers of all stripes—creative and scholarly, nonfiction and fiction, Big 5 and indie press—to get their work out into the world. I’ve come to realize that writing and design, both before and after the application of digital tools, are the foundation of digital humanities.
The image above represents a small selection of the websites on which I’ve collaborated with creators and institutions to showcase their artistic and scholarly pursuits. To the work I do with each of my clients, I bring my knowledge of how to translate the academic and creative into the visual and digital. In testimonials, clients will often refer to my ability to both understand what their writing was trying to achieve and translate that understanding into beautiful and accessible digital design. Below I highlight one case study that demonstrates this relationship between academic access and design.
Caltech Library
I was the Design Lead on a complete redesign of the Caltech (California Institute of Technology) Library website, working with a programmer and project manager to create a new portal for the library. The website received accolades both from the content management system we used (Springshare) for its design and from Caltech for its accessibility.
Improved navigation
The team restructured the organization of our previous website with a focus on action-based menu categories, informed by user testing with Caltech students and faculty. We now have five main color-coded categories that make our services and resources easier to find and discover. The team also added landing pages at each subsection that orient patrons with brief descriptions of what they will find there.
Archives integration
The integration of the Caltech Archives & Special Collections into the Library platform, when they previously had a stand-alone website, was an exciting and overdue development. The Caltech Archives is now part of the Library web ecosystem and its new home features improved architecture and aesthetics.
Vibrant visual interface
The team approached the redesign of our previous website with an eye to making it both easy and enjoyable to use. Images, colors, typeface, and graphics were chosen or modified to make the website more visually pleasing. An improved mobile design also enhances the user experience.
Reflective of the Library's values
The Library seeks to promote equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging for all members of the Caltech community in all of our collections and services. With these goals in mind, the website redesign team considered improved accessibility at every step of the process. The team also redesigned the home page to allow the Library to share more news, events, and featured resources.
Updated, reduced, and integrated content
An extensive “spring cleaning” content audit of over 500 pages reduced redundancy and complexity, integrated Library research guides with webpages, and fortified our search results to fully include databases, FAQs, site info, and research guides.
Benefits to Library staff
Choosing the LibGuides content management system improved efficiency for our Library staff due to integration with other Springshare products we already used. We also simplified content editing due to reduction from three disparate web content systems to the one we now present to our patrons.