The Bogotá Digital Library: A Wagtail Success Story

Speaker 1: There we are, welcome everybody. We are live now, huh?

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: Welcome everybody join in to the Bogota Digital Library session. Just give it a minute while people are coming in before we start. You can say hello in the chat if you'd like to and use the chat and the QA for all your questions as well. It'll be brilliant. We'll have a time for maybe one or two at the end, I should think. And if we don't get to your questions, then maybe you could contact Juan in the lobby on the chat. And Juan, are you okay to share your slides after as well? Awesome. Right. So I'm delighted to welcome Juan, who's going to share how the Bogota Digital Library uses Wagtail to power an open collaborative platform where citizens, librarians

Speaker 1: and cultural mediators co-create and preserve the city's cultural and literary literary heritage. I'm gonna hand over to you, Juan.

Speaker 2: Thank you, Lisa. Can you hear me? Okay, and can you see my screen also?

Speaker 1: Yes.

Speaker 2: Okay. Thank you. Hello everyone. Thank you very much for your time and thank you very much for Wagtail space invitation for you. I'm going to show how the Bogota Digital Library or Biblioteca Digital de Bogota works or has been designed and developed and currently works. It's a beautiful project. And how Wagtail also helps us or the admins to run the library smoothly. So A little bit about myself. My name is Juan Aguyo. I couldn't delete Aguajo.

Speaker 2: Aguajo is a boutique UX strategy marketing and technology consultancy firm. We do projects in Latin America and North America. work uh the strong focus user experience design just want to share this slide that that shows our our whole strategy There's a lot of UX here and then what our UX strategy team finds goes into websites. And this is basically what we have done before here for there or the library. What is the bogota digital library? What is the bogota digital library?

Speaker 2: So I would say like the formal description is a public, open and collaborative platform that integrates content from multiple sources to preserve organize and disseminate the city's cultural, historical, and literary heritage through accessible people centered experiences. It's a library that integrates different repositories and puts all the information information just in one place so people can access those information, can share those information, and can then add some of their comments or even build all the experiences to share. with some other people. I'm going to uh make just a quick tour, a very quick tour, so you can have an idea of how it works.

Speaker 2: So this is the homepage. You can see. Um We have collections here. Collections is just a group of cultural resources. We have expositions which are like what we call a museum exposition where you can explain a topic and then add some of the resources. The most similar uh just single resources so there are books here but you can have videos you can have uh photographs you can have pictures you can have audio and then you have the the possibility to look for a new resource. For example, we're going to look for Cien an Soledad.

Speaker 2: And uh we can go directly to one of the resources. Like this one. And then you can find, you can see a description of the book. You can find some metadata about the source where we are getting fetching this information from. the format, the year of publication, and if you want to, you can go click here and you go directly to the actual source of the of the content uh we have a more small explanation here explain the user that's going to open in another way this is the like the most basic part of the of the library

Speaker 2: It's the library. You can add this to one of your collections. So there's a very very nice idea here about institutional collections, users collections expositions. So let's say like I like this and have built my own collection so I can look for this later. So I have a couple of collections here. I can just click here in my collection of this. save this and has been saved for for my so I can look for it later. Let me see. Oh so I'm going to share what institutional collection is. So as a user I can build my collections

Speaker 2: but also there are authorities, cultural authorities. like um other libraries so they can share with us specific collections which have been created by experts before. So you can see that these are general collections and let's say that I would like to go into this Apro Colombian collection of literature. I can click here, this small description. There's a counter here telling me that there are 19 books in this particular collection You can see that they're PDFs, that they're different kind of resources. And if I want to, I could click on one of these and it's exactly the same thing. what what I've seen before.

Speaker 2: I go into the book, but the collection is built by or has been built by by a group of different resources that make sense for that collection or for the name that that specific collection These are reviews for the collection as well. Sorry, for this particular book And then I can go into collections that have been built by other users here. So uh there are different kind of collections here. I can go into my own personal collections, which is let's say I'm a regular user, I can build my own collection and have any any amount of books here or or press releases or press articles

Speaker 2: or one guide of study here. This has photographs, articles And then I can go into collections that are collaborative collections that I have invited or have joined and are and are uh and are different or other users collaborate as well just the same dynamic people add resources to to this specific collection so um If I can if I go to any of this collection, you'll see that These are the other collaborators. This is the main creator. If I go and click on any of these users, I can see what other collections have been created by him.

Speaker 2: So it's like the whole idea of creating experiences cultural experiences around the idea of just sharing books that have been connected from different repositories repositories. And then we have expositions, which is the all the other very interesting part. Expositions work. just like uh what happens in museums so you have an expert that tells a little bit about a particular topic expands on the topic And then using Wactail, he starts to add different components to build his exposition or their exposition and can also relate particular resources

Speaker 2: which are also books or or the specific for example this is an exposition so you can see uh this expose particular exposition has different topics which are part of the main exposition. So if you go into this specific part of this chapter of the exposition, you'll see that This is all uh managed by the editor in Waxio. I showed that a little bit later with from the admin 's point of view. But you can see that there are different components and and so the the creator or the can expand on the on the information. We also have a timeline

Speaker 2: Timeline, it's very interactive, it's very nice. So if you click here, you can see okay, what was this part and what did this happen about the whole history of bicycles in Colombia? And if you like to go into the resource again. You can just click here and go back to the user to the particular resource and go to the content that you want to and it will open a new tab and take directly to the library that provides the content. And then you have a profile. So this is the general idea of how the the digital library border works And these are the numbers behind. So the project was launched in

Speaker 2: 2019. uh i'm going to show a uh uh timeline just after this slide but to this point it was released just connecting 13 public libraries part of the district libraries network in Bogota uh and then it has has grown to to get more sources of information. So right now we have 123 connected sources, private and public libraries, and as well as other cultural repositories. Right now uh the library has six around six hundred fifty thousand index resources. uh 150,000 registered users, uh

Speaker 2: user credit collections, it's something around 16,000 Community reviews for books or for cultural resources, particular cultural resources It's something about 168 community reviews. This model was released in December 2024, uh the at the at the at the end of last year. And the whole library uh can uh it's it's goes for the accessibility standard of double a just to make sure that people would some um limitations can go through the contact without any problem. What's the story behind the project?

Speaker 2: This is the general timeline. And obviously the project It's so nice, so powerful that there's a huge theme behind this and and for this kind of project there has to be uh strategy defined previously and that's what uh uh our client did and when i talk about our client means part of the district libraries uh team and also uh part of the governments team so uh uh bogota and we're talking about 2013 conceptualizations foundations uh what basically happened there is that they realized that a huge part of the user base for the physical district libraries were very young,

Speaker 2: where young people were internet savvy people. They used a lot of mobile devices and they were going to libraries to find information for their studies. And then this question starts to happen in their minds. Okay, how what's what's the next step? What should we do? And then very nice Ideas came 2017, an ideathon, hackathon, intersectoral workshop looking for innovation. helped define the general guidelines of what was going to become to later become the digital library of Bogota. Then 2018 a formal RFP request for proposal was launched. Um we were we

Speaker 2: we won the the project, we started to work for the initial release, which was published in 2019, and at this point it was only Django, and and that made sense. because uh the very first part was only going fetch resources from different repositories or obviously process that information and put that information available for the users. You can create obviously your user profile but there was not a lot of interaction but that was exactly what happened later in 2020. So we were certificate bit to to have this challenge of of okay we need more interactivity

Speaker 2: and then uh how can what help us there later i'm going to talk that about that just in a couple of seconds just want to know like the conceptual work plan uh this is this is standard What happened here is uh discovering a strategy first step. Then we went into information architecture and graphic user interface design. Information architecture I mean wireframes were in part provided by our client uh after UI design we went into prototyping and user testing then development and then um website publication and then down here we have the line for the harvester

Speaker 2: which is basically the program that goes and fetches the resources and um content harvesting strategy, how were we going to implement that? And then we had to uh consider obviously uh what's what's going to be the the the impact in sale what's good how we're going to be facing the the SEO challenges. for for the content to to be indexed in Google. So we integrated that later into the into the the software. You you can consult this later. This is general uh plan that we had It's like detailed activities. So uh

Speaker 2: some of these were already provided by the client, but In general terms, this is this is what we were doing. And um so two 2019-2020 We were facing the challenge of how can we create engagement in the library, not just have a website where users can go and access specific books, but how can we start to create experiences? The challenge was brought to us by our client. They really have a very good idea of what we should be doing. And then we start to talk about user-created collections, then we start to talk

Speaker 2: about interactions with collections, then we start to talk about expositions and improving the expositions experience. And at this point , Wagtail was we started to have conversations about using Wagtail for the admins. This is and this is general for everything that we do. We believe obviously because we are strong advocates of user experience, we believe user experience is the gateway. to technology adoption. And we mean this works for both ways or for both kind of users. For the final user. But also for the admin

Speaker 2: because I have seen or we have seen tons of projects that a couple of years or months later just disappeared because it was very difficult to manage. It was they were very difficult to to to manage the content to to keep this flow the easiest way. So Yeah, Wagtail worked very, very well for us. So I I took this quote from Wachtel, which is beautiful. Wacttail CMS is a toolkit designed to empower content editors. Our job as developers is to make life easier for editors. without giving them the part to break things. And and that was one of our challenges, obviously. The whole process of publishing content, publishing

Speaker 2: expositions, creating new experiences in the digital library Bogota was a challenge in terms of how complex the the the whole the whole project was. 2019 This is the general overview. So Django was doing the whole work. No, no, no, um, I wouldn't say that there It was major interaction for for the users. It was obviously very nice, but uh then we added rocktail and we focused or we uh argue the use the usage of Wachtel for editing and improving the user experience for the admin specifically I believe.

Speaker 2: in terms of tasks so for you just guys to know what's the difference between those two why because I believe that one of the key success Uh the success case for this project is is like this separation or division between what Django does. And what is it that is very good for some specific things. And then how can we use rocktail? to to integrate with Django but also to elevate the admin experiences. So we have here content harvesting, which basically connects and fetches resources, processes and normalizes uh then we have the setup for this harvester because

Speaker 2: we have to configure or setup uh the resource that we're going to be getting information from and we have to make some equivalences so make sure that some fields match with other fields so then the information can be normalized in Django without any problems. And then we have a basic admin for adding resources. So we can go and get those resources. And then we have Wachtel for managing expositions, managing the help center and organizing navigation. And then as the Django interface was not that friendly , we took advantage of Wachtel 's user interface to add

Speaker 2: i status. overview for for our client for the harvester because the harvester makes this very technical tasks and goes gets a lot of resources. So I would like to share a couple of screens here so you can have an idea of what is uh Well what what what we mean by using rock tail with Dita library. So obviously this is an exposition, the exposition that I showed just a couple of minutes ago So you can see here that you have the description of the exposition divided by tab content

Speaker 2: or field And then you have this interaction for added resources. So this is what Django is doing. Django is going and getting resources and organizing the information to be available for for the library later. But the the magic here is okay I can create an exposition but I can also relates to a specific resource that I want to show in the timeline for example. This one specifically refers to the resource that I showed in timeline Reusable components and this is something that Waxhield is is fantastic. I believe one of the strongest. uh advantages uh because now that we have built a lot of rockfield projects we and and we have more experience

Speaker 2: We know that we go from the idea of components and then that that tends to give the admins a lot of flexibility into adding different kinds of technologies. project. So in this case you can see that whenever I want to add a particular content, we have we already have the component that we're already using or reusing in a lot of other pages in Wagtail. Harvesting dashboard, this is um this interface that connects with Django and the infrastructure and gets messages of what's going on. So now the admin

Speaker 2: of the library who wants to start harvesting resources he just goes here and and starts creating this and and see how the harvesting process process is is progressing and and the status there is another one Here you can see how many new resources were created, how many were deleted, how many were updated if there were failings during the process. You can go into each of these details. So what the team did here was they went and they made a they correlated they use the usual the

Speaker 2: error codes which are very technical number codes and then they add a numb and a name for for each of these so the the admin knows what's actually going on they can see a progress bar for the whole thing because previously excuse me I just was waiting and did see what happens. Um and then I just want to close because I have just a couple of minutes but I think that I'm right in time Uh lessons learned and I would say that this is in general for any kind of this project. design CMS for editors have in mind the user who is behind

Speaker 2: because I believe that uh Part of the success of this project has to do with the idea of thinking who is going to be managing the content of this website. How can we make his life easier? And that's that's Really, really important, I believe. One of the most important lessons that we have learned throughout our history or our experience. This idea of single responsibility principle, which goes down into codes and functions, etc. can go up also. You can go into a more general idea and this is Okay , understand where Django adds value and then understand where Wagtails adds value and and define the strategy to build

Speaker 2: the the whole project according to that. And a good client is 50% any great project. And uh we were very good doing building what they had in mind. Our client already had the vision and the strategy. So they came to us already knowing where they wanted to go and that helped a lot. A lot of people made this possible and I just want to say thank you for uh uh this is a reduced list to be honest. There are a lot of more people Um but you wanna say thank you because uh although I'm just exposing this, the reality is that uh

Speaker 2: the merit goes to a lot of this. Very very nice people. Maybe it's possible.

Speaker 1: Brilliant. Thank you, Juan. We have got a couple of questions for you just to squeeze in very quickly. Well Gabriel actually sent three, so I'm going to give them to you one at a time, like quickfire ones. How much of your time do you spend building restrictions?

Speaker 2: Okay, how much of your time do you spend building restrictions scope controlateral views? Do you get much feedback in the time? from the authors that's that's out of our our uh scope like uh our client is the district libraries network and they have policies and they have all the resources and they connect and talk with other private and public libraries And uh so we don't there are policies obviously, but I I believe that I cannot answer that specific questions because from from a wise perspective, which we're just designing and building the platform. We don't go into into into that. Now

Speaker 2: we are talking about technical restrictions. Uh building the harvester took almost like between five six months something like that and we were we had a guideline which is Dublin core uh protocol or or standard. So yes, we took some time into thinking okay how how to match data doing some test testing and then seeing if that worked fine. Do you get much feedback and thanks from the authors? I believe the the district library does. We have some good reviews. But where we we we don't have any merit in to that uh that particular

Speaker 1: And then we have one more question about localization, which might be more for the client as well, but is content published in multiple languages? So do they and do they translate their books as well?

Speaker 2: Uh I believe they're there uh other their books they're written in other languages. It's all this part of the of the content that's managed is again managed by the libraries. So we have connected 123 repositories and they have tons of books. And obviously I believe that they have different languages, but it's not I I cannot answer for that in terms of what we do. I I know that they spend the resources and we And we just showed the resources exactly.

Speaker 1: Cool, that's fine. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Fuan, for coming and sharing your story with us today. Everyone, you've got a couple of minutes now to get back to your Next sessions. Thanks everyone.

Speaker 2: Lisa, thank you very much.

Speaker 1: Thank you.

Speaker 2: And everyone.