Where’s the Library? New York Public Library Releases Beta of Improved Location Finder

From a NYPL Blog Post by Sean Redmond:

Today we’re very excited to launch the public preview of a new design for the Locations section of nypl.org. With thousands of people every day trying to find or planning to visit one of over 90 NYPL branches, the Locations section is the most heavily visited part of the website after the homepage. The current design has served us well for several years, but it was high time to take a new look at this critical piece of the site and bring it up to date. We’ve been testing our new version internally for a couple of months now and we’re ready to open it up to the public for beta testing at http://locations-beta.nypl.org.
We’ve enhanced our complete listing of libraries by adding a smart search. Just start typing a library name and you’ll get suggested matches. Or, search by address, zip code, or landmark (like “City Hall”) to see the closest branches in an interactive map view. Of course, on a mobile device, you can click “Libraries near me” to let your phone’s GPS do the work.
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For those of you that are interested in the technology, this is built in Angular. It’s our first big project using this framework and the experience was good enough that we plan to continue with it. nypl.org is a Drupal site, and the basic data is still administered in Drupal, but we’re exporting it via an API for use in the front-end. Once we were already pretty far down this road we discovered it was something of a trend and already had a name: Headless Drupal. Right now, it’s a good compromise for us between the best of the new web technologies and the investment we already have in several years of Drupal development.

Read the Complete Blog Post (848 Words)
Direct to Location Finder Beta

Filed under: Data Files, Libraries, News, Public Libraries