Experimenting With Repository UI Design

I'm always on the lookout for engaging UI paradigms to inspire repository design, and I recently noticed that Blogger has made some new "dynamic views" available. It provides a variety of smart presentation styles aren't a million miles away from the ones emerging on smartphone apps, combining highly visual and animated layouts.

So I've imported some repository contents into Blogger to get some hands on experience, and I'd be interested in any feedback on whether this looks useful or compelling.

• The new blog is called Mike O'Lection - it's a little DSpace repository joke.  .
• New views
• Sidebar: http://mikeolection.blogspot.com/view/sidebar
• Timeslide: http://mikeolection.blogspot.com/view/timeslide
• Mosaic: http://mikeolection.blogspot.com/view/mosaic (very Tumblr)
• Snapshot: http://mikeolection.blogspot.com/view/snapshot
• Flipcard: http://mikeolection.blogspot.com/view/flipcard
• Original repository pages: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17386/, http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21289/, http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21622/, http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21030/

These views suit various different types of material, but the constant theme that is emerging is that a good visual is pretty much de rigeur for any resource. This means that relying on the thumbnail image of an article's first page is not going to be a good strategy (hint: they all look the same.) I can forsee the need to extract figures and artwork from the PDFs and Office Documents uploaded to a repository.

(Over the next few days I hope to put some more examples on the blog to help get a better feel for how this will work. But I think I might make a bulk Blogger exporter for EPrints because manual cut and pasting is only enjoyable for a few minutes!)