This resulted in a split vote between two of the designs and some interesting feedback for both:
Vote for option 1:
“Dates are secondary information, so I think having them in grey will separate them from the different name options.”
Vote for option 2:
“No. 2 isn’t as pretty as no. 1 but it’s faster to read, which is my top priority in collections stuff.”
Ultimately it seemed like having all the information on one line helped researchers scan faster, and as this was one of our primary user goals, we decided to move forward with this layout. We wanted to acknowledge, however, the aspects of the other designs that researchers liked and therefore decided to create a hybrid solution. We refined it further after one more round of feedback from the team and ended up with a design that helps researchers more easily find the information that they need.