NEWSLETTER May 2006
Here we are at the end of Year I, with a year of planning and a second year of implementation behind us, the Craft Revival website is near ready to release. Please take a look—a close look—at the website, still at its test bed home at:
http://www.wcu.edu/libtestbed/testthings/craftproto/
On the site, you will be welcomed by new pages and old, including:
We’ve had several conversations in past meetings that focused on how the storyboard and database would interface. You can try this out using the website links embedded in the storyline. There are links from tags in the story line that go to individual item records and links that go to pre-set searches, taking the reader to multiple items in the database. We haven’t made as much use of pop-ups as I had planned, but you can see how these function by clicking on madder and/or indigo on the Dyeing page. There are also links that lead the viewer to other sites on the World Wide Web, particularly to Heritage Partner home sites. We will be asking each of you to add a Craft Revival link to each Heritage Partner homepage.
The Craft Revival website is designed to be expandable and, next year, after we’ve added a significant number of images to the database, we’ll be able to add additional links. For example, at this point we only had one Chiltoski carving, so it didn’t make too much sense to take the viewer from the storyboard to the database for this single image. Even items important to the story, coverlets for example, can’t begin to function as intended because we have yet to add numbers of coverlets to the database. But after next year, when we anticipate that we’ll have a dozen scans of each, these tags will make for additional links to preset searches.
At the end of Year I, the database has 182 of entries, representing 220 scans; the difference in these numbers reflects combining scans using the compound object function in Content dm. (For those of you who are not familiar with our content management system, Content dm allows us to link multiple scans to a single record. We’ve used this for pamphlets and newsletters, so the viewer can access them page-by-page.) To stay on track with our overall goal of having 1,000 to 1,500 database entries in the completed project, we’ll have to double our numbers next year.
Melissa is still working on cleaning up and loading images onto the home page. We began constructing the home page using our promotional site and have incorporated and revised it as the new site grew.
I will present the site to the group at the Advisory meeting next Wednesday. Beforehand, the Hunter Library Home Team will be taking a hard look at it as well. George and Melissa, please bring your experience with Kephart to bear. Brian, please review the text and records to ensure consistency with metadata and cataloging standards. Bob, we so appreciate your editorial eye and I will bring you a paper copy to facilitate your review. Anyone else is welcome to weigh in. Because this is a significant event for our project, I am sending this email out to the entire library, so your peers can see what we’ve been up to all these months.
The site is also being sent to mStoner, the university’s web consultant. They will be providing us with a written evaluation that we’ll review at our first Year II meeting. We can discuss their evaluation and use it to improve the site over the course of Year II. We will also be working with them during Year II to complete our usability testing, so their assessment will be a nice way to begin our work together. At the start of Year II, the site will also go before the Hunter’s Reference unit. Vacations interfered with our doing that at this time, but we’ll start out Year II by having Reference review the site with patrons and students in mind.
Next Wednesday is our final Advisory and Partners meeting. I will be sending out the agenda on Monday. Our most significant piece of business will be a discussion of the website, its coherence, functionality, and appearance. After your input and corrections are made, the site will be loaded onto our public URL address.
You can begin to share this with friends and colleagues. One of the first tasks of our new year will be to advertise the site. I will be calling on you to distribute a short press release with the website address via the various list-serves that you subscribe to. With a variety of disciplines represented around the table, I think we will hit lots of different, yet relevant, groups of people.
I will not be sending out anymore newsletters this year and will be leaving for vacation at the end of this month. At the meeting we’ll have a short update on the status of our Year II grant application and anticipate that we’ll begin anew on the first of July. It’s been a pleasure to work on this project and I look forward to seeing many of you at our meeting next Wednesday.
Anna
Hunter Library | Library Insider | Last updated: 5/12/06 Melissa Young