Rebuilding INSPIRE together with the HEP community

The INSPIRE digital library has been serving the scientific community for the almost past 50 years. Previously known as SPIRES, it was the first web site outside Europe and the first database on the web. Today, INSPIRE connects more than 100’000 scientists in High Energy Physics worldwide, with over 1 million scientific articles, thousands scientific profiles of authors, data, institution, experiments, conferences and jobs in High Energy Physics. In order to bring INSPIRE to the next level, we recently rebuilt the platform based on modern tools and infrastructure and released the new INSPIRE version in beta a few months ago. To ensure a successful beta release, we worked closely with the High Energy Physics community to identify the users’ needs, drivers and barriers. In this paper, we describe the user-driven process that we followed, our testing strategy, as well as the user feedback following the INSPIRE beta release.