 Good afternoon and welcome. I'm Judy Russell, the Dean of University Libraries at the University of Florida. Today I'm joined by Lori Taylor and Todd Digby. We're going to present you with information about the development of our new user interface for our digital library collections. First we're going to present a brief history of our digital library system at the University of Florida, and then what led us to redeveloping the digital library system and bringing it up to current technological and design standards. We'll also discuss the development process we use to develop the system and create separate digital library portal for our Florida digital newspaper library collection. UF began digitizing in the 1990s and launched the UF digital collections in 2006. In the past 15 years the system has grown to over 15 million pages that include multiple content and media types, including text, images, audio, video, maps and newspapers. The system also supports content in multiple languages, and the digital library of the Caribbean has interfaces in English, Spanish and French. As the system developed it grew in complexity to accommodate the unique characteristics of these various types of digital content. The system was powered by the open source SOBEXCM system that was originally developed at the University of Florida, and it's run on a Windows based servers. Over the past decade there have been minor incremental system updates, but the interface essentially stagnated. The system has served the library and its users well for the past decade, but its age is showing and change was needed. With our plans to load over a million pages per year the combined production and patron system were overloaded. As I mentioned it was time to make some major improvements. The interface was outdated and it was not mobile responsive. Additionally there was a backlog of enhancement requests that had accumulated. Migrating to a different open source or commercial platform was examined, but given the variety of content and media types, as well as the production integration demands. There was no clear solution that could be easily adapted to meet our needs. So we decided it was time to rebuild our digital library system. For our minimum viable product, all development had to be done while the current system continued to operate with no interruptions. We needed to ensure permanent links persisted and that the production went on uninterrupted. I'm now going to pass this over to Lori Taylor to discuss the background on the development of the new UFDC system. So with the old UFDC system as a monolith that facilitated both the public interface and the staff production environment. While that system had adequate backups and digital preservation systems in place, it lacked sufficient redundancy for the live public facing discovery systems, as well as the back end production system. With the old system if there were issues, there was a good chance about the public discovery interface and the back end production could be impacted and could even be down. As we were getting fresh, we wanted to make sure that we were following modern design principles that would separate the production and the discovery systems, so that if one suffered an issue or outage, the other side would not be impacted. Additionally, we've learned over the past few years that was difficult to find developers that were familiar with the technology use in the existing system. And we needed to focus on building a system using technologies that today's developers are familiar with, so that we can more easily address any development and staffing needs into the future. By fabricating the system into the front end and back end components to address possible downtime and to ease development, we wanted the new system to be built with more robust redundancy and failover as part of the deployment process. So we began building our new system by focusing on the public facing system, the highest impact and the highest value and really the highest need as well. We continued to use the data from the existing system to feed the new front end. We built a new API environment, so lots of circuit breaker patterns to ensure things don't go down and that everything could be testable for test driven development to make sure we knew where the problems were and we could continuously improve. So the development gave us the opportunity to move from a Windows based server environment with IIS and Microsoft SQL to a Linux architecture and we're also using Postgres, Elasticsearch and Nginx for the front end. We've done additional effort during this initial timeframe to undertake a cleanup where we had so many different collections, very much a boutique structure where we had over 900. Now we're down to right about 460. This puts in place, we've put in place better standards for our collections based on the user experiences. So a collection probably shouldn't have two items that doesn't add value to the user, and it can be confusing if you're searching within two items. So this is all of the work that we've continued for system development to make sure that the system is as usable and user focused as possible. So we focused on our target objectives for the initial release to prevent feature load and continued refinement that would slow down the release. We set out to define a minimum viable product or MVP for the initial release. And then we had alpha and beta release stages. We have a large list of future refinements and enhancements that will be worked out over the years to come and soon we'll be scheduling those with a roadmap for quarter one, three, four for 2022 and 2023. Our next major undertaking is in planning on how to reimagine or re-architect the backend production system and workflows to modernize those workflows. And as we've worked on the patron site, we've learned a lot about the needs of production and workflow changes that will come. I just wanted to note that the three sites right are alive and running right now. And so we have two URLs for each because we're recording this in November before the full live sites are live. So we have the alpha URLs which are accessible from everywhere in the world, and the beta real URLs which will be live at the time that you're seeing this. The Digital Library of the Caribbean has an extra link as well. This is really important. It's one of the cultural and organizational findings. Our patrons really wanted a patron site. But with the Digital Library of the Caribbean or DLAC partners also have organizational needs, partner voting needs, other governance materials, and that really needed its own space as well. And so now we have a DLAC partners governance site. Please note all of the content is included in the UF Digital Collections. So everything in DLAC and the Florida newspapers are also in the UF Digital Collections, which has been since the start of UFDC in 2006. One of the other really important things that we've changed in our development process is how we engage with our internal stakeholders and users. So we've updated the stakeholder groups to move from digital production to end user representatives for input on the front end designs, really making sure we're getting input from our reference and our special collections librarians as well as our social media, and other users across the libraries were very attuned to our users. So now I'll turn it over to Todd who will show some of the sites. Thank you, Lori. So the results are in and, you know, we have in under a year we've from start we have a new patrons we have new patron systems. These include multiple different features that I will demonstrate here in a second as well. As we were saying, we also have a standalone first ever for standalone portal for the Florida digital newspaper library, which includes both historic newspapers through current newspaper issues. So I'm going to lead you through a little bit of a show and tell here and to look at our new features. So the new UFTC system is much, it's much nicer. It's, it's more modern. It's, we really developed this with a mobile first type of thinking where we really want this to be accessible and mobile. We do know that that's where a lot of our users are accessing our their content right now from. I'll just show you one item or one of our favorite search items is three little kittens. And as I show you that this is what our basic search results look like we can change the view on it right now. We can go from a thumbnail view to more of a list view for the items. We can also have filters we can filter by different facets. And when we go into an item we have all the materials that we have and like we mentioned previously we have multiple media types of maps, newspapers, video audio. The options on an item will change depending on the media type and the files associated with it. So one thing we're pretty proud of that we're accessing or providing really easy access to downloads of different file types or the PDF of a full version. We also have a flip book version which some people like to page through depending on the content. Others are that all of our pages that we have available that we can do a zoomable image as well wrapped in a normal page image. So I'll just show you a little bit of that so folks want to get in and really see a very high quality image. This is really nice on maps or aerial images that we have. We also have statistics readily available across for all day items from collection to overall to collection to individual item levels. We'll have statistics on those and those are available right for the user to see easily. One thing that we have, like we said, we have three different interfaces and they're very similar except for the logos and branding around them. So this is the digital library of the Caribbean interface with one of the nice parts about this is collections and partners where we do have a lot of partners with the digital library of the Caribbean. You can go through there and each partner then if you click they can actually have a separate segmented view of their content they can browse through that but like I said also statistics there how many items how many views are available right there right up front. One nice thing about the digital library that Caribbean interface, given the partners in the Caribbean we have developed English, Spanish and French interfaces. And this is a full interface change so all the all the icons, the contents, the logos, the search language is all automatically change even the language in the footers is automatically changed. The other thing about this interfaces are with our developers if someone's using a default like they're using Google Chrome and their default language for the browser is in French or Spanish it will it will pick up on that and automatically present the default language view for the for the user. One nice thing about this ability was we do a new system was very able to look at a big collection that has seen a lot of use and that was the Florida digital newspaper library, which was a collection within the UFTC but now we're able to pull that on to its own portal and present it to you. This way we're actually able to present different options for the users. Obviously, we don't have partners, but we do have newspaper titles publishers is also another person so our view and options for this collection are different than what we present for the others. One of the other nice parts about this. These are is that one of our big one of our big asks for what that is being able to search within a title so we can easily. Now we have some search within this title as an option. The search features actually follow as you click and as you go into a title further and further from from the right down into the issue can search within that issue very easily so we're trying to really look at this as a user center. Like Lori had mentioned we brought in a new stakeholder community to advise us on on the development and I think it's been very well rewarded and and so over the next few years we'll be seeing a number of additional enhancements as we as a brand new features and as we refine our interfaces for the for thinking of the users first. And. But I just wanted to, you know, a great part is the site is up. We did record this in, you know, as we said in early November. As of you watching this presentation it will be available and live. And so we please invite you all to come and visit it. And these are we just highlighted a couple of our. Items here one of the favorite items we show you get three little kittens it has definitely been our go to example as we look at metadata and the various content types when we built the interface and using that for years as one of our test items. And we're also sharing here the 1764 map of St Augustine, which is a high definition map from 1764 just as one of my favorite items because I've used it in a new, a new interactive map that we're going to be releasing fairly soon for University of Florida historical properties in St Augustine so it's one of my favorite items because I'm able to use it in real life these days. So this is our presentation today I want to thank you I want to thank Dean Russell and Lori for joining us today and please if you have any questions moving forward please don't be shy to reach out to any one of us. Thank you.