Curated Access Platform

Context

The John Carter Brown Library (JCBL) is one of the world’s leading collections of “Americana”—books, maps, manuscripts, and other materials from the late-15th to mid-nineteenth centuries pertaining to the New World. The collection’s 52,000 items serves reaches an international and interdisciplinary community of scholars working on crucial research around race, slavery, and settler colonialism in the western hemisphere.

Design Challenge

Despite an ambitious digitization program, however, the John Carter Brown Library’s digital collections remain fragmented across platforms, support few research tools, and lack interpretive context for broader audiences. What might we build to address these shortcomings?

Design Principles

Based on research with the collection, its staff, former scholars in residence, and other stakeholders, we generated six key design principles for a new JCBL research and digital collections platform:

1. One platform to rule them all: the collection must be unified.
2. Inclusive Americana: the platform serves a multilingual, international community and supports research into the full range of stories and perspectives on the Americas.
3. A place where curious minds meet: the platform is a digital space not just for discovery and research but also collaboration.
4. Show me what I need, when I need it: the platform offers many sophisticated research tools, but does not overwhelm the user with a cluttered and complex interface.
5. Engineered serendipity: the digital platform facilitates the kinds of unexpected, spontaneous discoveries that are associated with physical collections.
6. A living collection: the platform brings the JCBL collection to life by empowering users to annotate items and produce digital stories.

Concept

Our team of experience designers, visual designers, and developers researched, conceived, and implemented a version 1.0 “curated access platform” that would unify the library’s digital collections, provide cutting-edge research and collaboration tools, and support new storytelling formats to engage the broader public.

Role

Experience Designer & Design Researcher, Fabrique

Client

John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island