Hydra UX call - 7 May 2015

Attendees:

Jack Reed - Stanford, geospatial web engineer

Axa Liauw - blacklight projects at Princeton

John Kratz - data curation postdoc at CDL

Mark Notess - IU, Avalon product owner; UX manager

- Mark mentioned he is leaving IU & Hydra at the end of the month. This meeting will continue, however.

Motivation: 

- a stakeholder was interested in viewing collections in Spotlight; one need was a way to view items on a map from the geospatial data they had

- users are expecting map-type interfaces for discovery

- Blacklight maps grew organically out of the expressed need, but they looked at several commercial applications that used maps for discovery, e.g., Google Maps, FourSquare. Also looked at GeoHollis beta at Harvard and the DPLA map

- UX design challenges include discovery vs. refinement (zooming updates results list) vs. visualization; large results sets; varying institutional needs; metadata (e.g.., LC subject headings don't work so well for map-based results)

- latitude & longitude don't work that well if you want to reference a country and you are within that country; could do bounding boxes but not so helpful for the USA; could do polygonal outline--best?

- ArtWalk site at Oregon State (uses Blacklight Maps); also DPLA map view; Digital Commonwealth

- still a work in progress--would like feedback from this group; the github page is a good place to provide feedback; blacklight dev list also has discussion about it

- currently a plugin deployed at three institutions; Stanford interested in adding more map interfaces into their catalog; BPL has the most public/used version in their Digital Commonwealth site (Eben English)

- Axa: gallery plugin, very visual collection; American Ephemeral collection; trying to get the Bootstrap components out of it. Some of it was tied into Bootstrap too much. Were able to use other components such as Masonry. 

- Jack: We just launched earthworks... based on GeoBlacklight.. a new discovery portal for gis data available at https://earthworks.stanford.edu . Implements some new blacklight features like autocomplete in search bar

- John: early in project; ingest and discovery, with a research data focus; collecting metadata; improve the interface and allow it to sit on other repos. Current doing user stories and early wireframes.

- Mark: continuing Avalon work – structural metadata navigation of media; some new metadata fields; working on getting Avalon 4 out early this summer

No topics were suggested for future meetings.

Next call: Thursday, June 4, at 11:30 EDT.