I've had a heck of a time googling for this as I keep getting directed to resource libraries about UX.
My company is redesigning their resource library (tons of webinars, guides, whitepapers, case studies etc.) This is a pretty common website section to have, so I'm hoping to find some pre-existing research or best practice into how users interact with them and what they want out of them.
I'm an employee at Freshdesk and here is how we have designed the resources page and I personally like the design very much.
With subtle changes to the same design you can have a resource library that can have any number of resources.
Following are the minimum things that require to design a large resource library
Search
User should be able to find the resource as fast as he can if he have enough information about what resource he wants
Navigation is a must.
User must know what kind of resources exist in the site and there should be a small navigation so that user can access a particular type of resource in a single click.
Few samples of each type of resource
These can be random depending on the user. If the site is not static it can be in two ways
Exclusive page for each resource page
From the main resource page there can be a view more link to the exclusive resource page where all the contents of a particular type can be added. This page should also have options to filter and search the resources based on different criteria. ( depends on what kind of resources you use)
I don't really know of any formal research on this topic, but this is a fairly common problem in companies (see related question: Ways for a company to organize common/shared Icons Images and Graphics)
Some use cases I came across related to this:
I need to make external communications and I'm looking for branding and communication guidelines
e.g. Notifying customers about an event - Is there a brand template I'm suppose to be using? What about the tone / language for the message? formal? casual? US English or UK English? etc
e.g. Speaking at a conference representing the company - Is there a powerpoint template you should be using? Is there a pre-written slide/description to be used when introducing the company?
There's multiple teams in the company, has another team already done research on a specific topic that we can leverage?
I'm new to the company - A team member can direct me to some resources (webinars/guides) to help me onboard more quickly
