The Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library provides access to research resources, research assistance, and information management education for the students and staff of Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) and the clinical staff of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. In my capacity as Web Services Manager, I design, develop, and maintain the Library’s three Drupal 10 websites.

Web Design

The Library website design embraces the CUIMC brand and basic web design conventions while retaining a unique character through creative use of secondary and accent colors available in the brand guidelines. The design is clean, efficient, accessible and includes a subtle bit of playfulness.

The playfulness reveals itself in the website’s footer, where seasonal animations appear in the background. The following video shows how the animation changes over the course of a year.

Design System

The Health Sciences Library website is the basis for a design system built using Fractal and a highly customized subset of the Bootstrap framework. Bootstrap was selected because of it’s wide usage and familiarity. Fractal is a tool for building and presenting design systems, similar to Storybook but with much simpler tooling requirements. The Health Sciences Library design system is used to provide consistent branding and user experience to the Library's other websites and web-based platforms and simplify front-end maintenance.

Custom Drupal Theme

The design system is the basis for a custom Drupal theme. Each of the three websites maintained by the Health Sciences Library use the same base theme which builds upon the design system components. Each website also has custom subtheme – dependent on the base theme – that provides site-specific design and templates.

Development and maintenance of the custom themes is performed using NodeJS and several NPM packages to compile SCSS files into CSS stylesheets and SVG images into web fonts.

Custom Drupal Modules

I've developed several custom Drupal modules to provide additional features for the Health Sciences Library website. These modules include:

• Google Analytics Data API integration to provide automatically updated lists of most visited resources and most frequent search terms.
• Zendesk API integration to create service desk tickets from Drupal Webform submissions.
• LibApps API integration to provide class and special event information on the website.
• PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus API integration to enhance the website search.
• Elsevier CiteScore API integration to provide additional information about journals in our catalog.
• Decision tree user interfacefor the Contact page to route requests to the appropriate staff members.