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Center-for-Digital-Narrative / elmcip

Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) is a collaborative research project funded by Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) JRP for Creativity and Innovation built in Drupal
https://elmcip.net
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Research Review pt 1. Research Collection #411

Open hannahackermans opened 5 years ago

hannahackermans commented 5 years ago

I am making a review of the functionality of the KB specifically as a research tool. I will review two elements: the research collection and the data export. This is part one, which is a research collection review. I will post the data export review later in a separate and link it here.

I have populated all the fields of a new research collection in test to see how everything shows up in view. Here are my comments, which includes both little things that need to be fixed and suggestions to make the research collection more functional for research developing collections. As with the dashboard review (#405), please read the comments @elmcip and @steinmb and let me know which numbers you want to work on. I will then make individual issues for each them.

  1. Most record types to be included in the collection are simply named “People”, “Creative works”, etc. There are two exceptions: “Database or Archive reference” and “Platform referenced”. Out of the two of these “Databases and Archives” is listed in view without the word “reference” and it is simply part of the research collection. Platform on the other had is listed in the left box as a reference. Considering the field help text stating “use this field to include platforms/software in this collection”, my vote is to loose the word “referenced” in both edit and view and to list the platforms underneath the databases and archives as a inclusion in the database.

    screenshot 2019-01-06 09 55 56 screenshot 2019-01-06 10 22 28 screenshot 2019-01-06 10 05 09

  2. After all the fields on the edit page are populated, there is another tab “Book Outline”. I can see how it might be useful to have this, but I've never understood how this works. How do I select a book? Will the research collection be listed on the KB record of the book or can the listed also be exported to be literally part of a digital book? If this is something we use, we should make it clear what the functionality entails and how to use it.

    screenshot 2019-01-06 09 57 33

  3. I chose one multimedia for every type available (uploaded, web, library, my files). Out of the four multimedia files I added (without any problems), only two show up in view. The two that show up are images (one ‘uploaded’ and one from ‘my files’). The two that do not show up are videos (one from ‘web’ and one from ‘library’). They are saved, when I go back to edit, all four are listed. Let me know if you need additional testing to understand the problem.

    screenshot 2019-01-06 10 08 37

  4. Addressed in issue #450. There is an XLS button for the creative works, but not for the other content types. For the research collection to function well for researchers, there needs to be at least an XLS button for the critical writings as well.

    screenshot 2019-01-06 10 08 54

  5. For critical writings, there are three columns: title, author, and year. As I have noticed while working on another research collection, it would be very useful to have an additional column for publication type, to differentiate between conference papers, books, articles, etc, as all of these are combined in critical writings and the difference is important when you have a big collection on a particular topic.

    screenshot 2019-01-06 10 08 54 - copy
    1. Currently, only title and year are used for sorting the rows; it would also be useful if we could make author (and publication type) could also become red buttons for both creative works and critical writings. We could also do this for the other content in the collection, but as creative works and critical writings will mostly likely always be the ones with the most entries, it is mostly useful for those two.
    screenshot5a

  6. Finally, one thing to think about for the future, which would help the research collection become more user friendly: Can we make it possible to add something to the research collection when you are editing a work? Often when I work on my research collection, I am looking for works in the database (or adding ones the database) and then I have to go back and forth to my research collection to add the works to my collection. Is it possible to add a field in the references and attachments of each type “add to research collection” with an autocomplete of all the research collections? The field help text would have to state clearly to only add things to your own research collection (ideally only collections associated with the user’s user ID would autocomplete but I guess this would not be feasible).

hannahackermans commented 4 years ago

hi @elmcip Is point 4 in this review what you meant by needing export on all referenced content in the research collection?