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SLQ Unstacked

By Jacinta Sutton | 10 May 2018

The State Library is excited to launch our latest project Unstacked. Over the last few months, we have been working with Interaction Designer Elisa Lee and Creative Technologist Adam Hinshaw, and their team to create a new way of visualising the State Library’s collection.

SLQ Unstacked

SLQ Unstacked

The Library has a lot of great content in our collection but unless you are specifically looking for it, it remains hidden. Unstacked is a real-time visualisation of the resources people are accessing from our catalogue One Search. It is a visual showcase of the items in our collection, curated by you, our users.

The user interface of Unstacked.

The user interface of Unstacked.

How it works

When a user clicks on a full record in One Search, it will be displayed in Unstacked as an image, a book cover, or a colour coded tile with the item details on it. The colours represent the different subject areas of the Dewey decimal system, or black, dark grey or white, depending on the resource type. For example a book, photograph, blog post or index record, are all displayed in different ways.

Whether a user is searching while onsite or offsite is also distinguished with onsite use depicted with the visual mark of the turned page. Clicking on the image or tile opens up are larger view with more item details and a link back to the catalogue record in One Search. This facilitates a reverse searching event. For further information read the 'About the project' page.

Unstacked continuously updates to reflect the real-time searching our users are conducting in One Search.

About the project view in Unstacked.

About the project view in Unstacked.

Why Unstacked?

Through the creation of Unstacked I have learnt so much about the library’s collection. I have seen historical photographs from Ayr and Mount Morgan; bridge building photographs; a collection of items on the Russian Revolution; and numerous diaries, papers and photographs from different Queensland families. I may have never known about these had someone else not been searching for them.

Hopefully Unstacked will motivate and inspire you to explore our collection further. If we have early photographs of Ayr and Mount Morgan, chances are we have photographs from your home town as well. Or you may just enjoy watching the screen change as other people do the searching. You serendipitously see something new in our collection that interests you.

Visit Unstacked online or you may even find it displayed in various locations when you visit the library. We would love to know what you think, so if you have feedback on Unstacked – good or bad – please tell us.

By Rachel Wray, A/Coordinator, Digital Library Initiatives

 

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