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https://bie-ws.ala.org.au/ws
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Enhancements to literature data #61

Closed nickdos closed 10 months ago

nickdos commented 8 years ago

Suggestion by Ely:

Dear All, One of the things I committed to do during the recent ALA Roadmapping exercise was to work up a problem statement about ALA and linking full text digital literature. I’ve made a preliminary start in the attached document and would very much appreciate your input.

There’s actually a few different problems/ opportunities, now that I look at it.

  1. Citations shown on the Names tab on species pages in ALA should be clickable, not just static text. That is, you should be able to go from the ALA Names tab for a species straight to full text digital version of that citation.
  2. But content on the Names tab is drawn from APNI/APC and AFD so the URLs to form these links should actually be stored in those source databases. This may require changes to those databases, as well as a change to workflows or work practices to encourage researchers to populate those fields.
  3. Citations aren’t brought through to the Names tab for every species – but maybe that’s something in the ‘hold your breath for the new BIE’ category.
  4. And then there’s the literature tab in ALA, which throws a bunch of names as a query at BHL and at NLA’s Trove and comes back with a fairly random set of matches. This is actually a separate problem and I’ll document it in another problem statement. Tweaking the query to get better returns is a task on the ALA side that we can work up together.

What I’d like feedback on:

  1. Do you think it would be useful/ save time/ benefit you or other researchers to have a link straight to the full text for literature where it’s available? As in, is this a long term project worth starting?
  2. Do you think that people populating AFD and APNI/APC would be willing to modify their work practices to start to include those URLs, assuming the fields to store them are available in the database?
  3. Would it help if the BHL team did a bit of preliminary work to seed the databases with those URLs as a proof of concept so that I can work with ALA to make it work technically?
  4. Where is the appropriate place to have discussions about process and linking conventions? For example, we could link to either the cataloguing record, or to the exact page in BHL. If it’s the exact page then which ‘exact’ is it – the start of the article, or the page on which you see the actual name? Is this a HISCOM/ FCIG discussion to start with?
  5. Do you have any feedback on the problem statement?

I do realise that literature didn’t attract very many dots during our Roadmapping exercise, so your feedback to me might be ‘not a priority, let’s get images solved first’. I too appreciate that point of view but am hoping that this incremental change might just make ALA better for all – even if it takes time to deliver.

adam-collins commented 10 months ago

Covered by the UX/UI review