Communication, Materials

New Minnesota Reflections website is faster and mobile-friendly

From Minitex, by Zachariah Miller

The Minnesota Digital Library has launched a faster, mobile-friendly website for it’s primary project, Minnesota Reflections. Minnesota Reflections is a database of 53,967 digitized original materials shared by 190 cultural heritage organizations located across Minnesota. The new site was announced today at the MDL Annual Meeting in St. Paul by Jason Roy, head of the University of Minnesota Libraries’ Digital Library Services unit.

In his announcement, Roy highlighted the new site’s faster load times, phone- and tablet-friendly layouts, and several powerful new features:

  • Site visitors can now browse the collection geographically by zooming into a map and clicking on pins.
  • New, easy-to-use search-limiting facets enable users to quickly narrow their search results by type (still image, text, etc.), date, topic, contributing organization, and many more.
  • Users can easily view audio and video content directly on the site using updated streaming technology, including captioning.
  • Social sharing links and citations in multiple formats make it simple for users to cite content and share it.

The project team included Scott Hreha, Link Swanson, and Paul Swanson from the Minitex IT unit and Jason Roy and Chad Fennell of the University of Minnesota Libraries’ Digital Library Services unit. The site is located at reflections.mndigital.org.