To promote our many Northwestern alumni authors and provide a valuable user experience, we built a fully customized, automated virtual bookshelf. Alumni authors can submit books they have written to be included, and new books are added regularly. Users can filter the CATalogue by genre, class decade, and author name. This initiative has also supported our overall programming by identifying authors as speakers for alumni education virtual events. In our research, we noticed many virtual bookshelves required manual entries. We needed a solution that could automatically add new entries when we upload a .csv file, similar to how we built our Alumni Small Business Directory. To accomplish this, our web development team built custom code that could translate a row in a .csv file and display it accordingly on our website. In addition, the bookshelf scrapes OpenLibrary.com for book covers, and if one doesn’t exist there, it adds a placeholder graphic that we designed. We can still manually change covers, but this solution means we don’t have to manually intake book covers from authors and resize them. This automation will lead to an enormous time savings for staff. We have experienced success from this program, with more than 1,075 entries and 6,700 page views in 2023. We have hosted six alumni author talks since launching the CATalogue, with more to come this year. We are thrilled with the results.
From the Judges
Overall, a good strategy that does well on user experience and shows impressive results. A simple but unusual idea which received great engagement from the alumni community.
