theme enhancements to review #176
Description
NYPL:
Liked the ability to limit search to “Division” – in their case, it’s Schomburg Center, Jerome Robbins Division – literally different whole libraries, but I think this could be helpful for limiting to searches of different collecting areas (Beck, Dance, etc.)
Liked the ability to put together thematic “sets” – for example, they have sets on African American women’s history, etc., both individual items as well as whole collections. We have materials on Japanese internment that we use constantly in class, as well as WWII-era in general, in a number of different collections - it’d be lovely to be able to just put them all in a set and point faculty to them. In some cases, we wouldn’t apply a metadata term that would consistently pull these together, and we’d potentially want to limit it to “this specific set of things.”
The feeds of “recently updated” and “recently digitized” collections is nice, though I’d be curious how much they’re actually used in practice (and I don’t know that we’d actually use them).
I LOVE the ability to narrow a search by date range, once you’ve searched on a term. This is an ongoing bugaboo for me and is complicated greatly by our consistently inconsistent and non ISO standard metadata. However, it is critical to our ability to provide good reference service. It’s a problem, but it’s a problem we don’t currently seem to have a solution to.
I also like the access protocol in place to prevent viewing of video/other content where we do not own the intellectual property to it – this hasn’t been an issue in the past because we only uploaded low-risk content that we could make entirely publicly accessible, but, as an example, we have many videos of Colorado Ballet that we’d like to upload and be able to manage the converted files of – and those are copyrighted works that we haven’t negotiated (and likely wouldn’t be able to negotiate) the right to show publicly in some cases.
Tulane & UCLA: After looking at UCLA’s, which uses the same platform (Islandora) at least from what I can tell, I’m going to compare the two, since it was helpful for me to think about what each of them did better or not as well.
Tulane:
I like that there are more browsing options on the first page. For me, I think we would need material type data (image/text/video/audio, etc.) – though Kevin and I would need to figure out what that might look like from a metadata perspective since I don’t know that this info is always applied consistently to our “object” records. I also like the ability to go directly to a straight browse list of the collections if we keep the main “browse” as a “title/thumbnail” gallery display – that way if you know what you’re looking for, you don’t have to page and page and page.
I really like that when you do a keyword search that it does a full text search and when you click on the object in the result set it takes you to the record, with that word highlighted.
I don’t like that it only shows you the title in a result set – we have a lot of photographs titled exactly the same thing, so we would ideally also display the date as a way to differentiate them.
UCLA:
Also has a “Quick Jump” collections list which, again, I like in the abstract – I don’t know if it’s best practice usability wise to click through into a sub-page as Tulane makes you do, but we also have potentially hundreds of collections, so I don’t know if a drop-down would make sense, probably wouldn’t.
I like that once you’ve done a search you can limit by collection and only look at that result set.
I don’t like you also don’t have the option to limit by subject/topic, date, etc.
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org- Erin’s favorite by far, but has a lot more bells and whistles than what we want/need/have the resources to do
https://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/
https://digital.library.cornell.edu/- Looks to be on Blacklight, so would be easy to replicate.