Green Digital Libraries: Progressive Web Apps, Sustainable Design, and Coding for the Greener Good
How would you measure the carbon footprint of your app or this website? What if you could use these measures to improve user experience and your own coding practices while supporting a greener web? In this session, we’ll look at efforts to understand how our websites and applications consume energy as a way to introduce sustainable software design, the practice of building software for low energy environments. We’ll focus on how sustainable design and development patterns (caching, optimizations, inline semantic markup, static Web pages, lean code techniques, open data/source, etc.) can be adapted to make better applications for our users and the energy grid. We’ll ground the session in a case study of a digital library progressive web app, MSU Dataset Search, which improves user experience while applying sustainable design. In the end, we’ll introduce tools and metrics for understanding how our software uses energy, outline the techniques and requirements for building sustainable software applications, and learn the roles we, as project managers and developers, can play in building a greener Internet.
