User Collections, Admin Sets, Display Sets

Owned by Bill Branan
Jun 16, 2017
5 min read

User Collections
<comment from Lynette Rayle, Cornell: I would suggest calling this User Sets allowing us to refer to all 3 using the general term collections with a type of User Set, Admin Set, or Display Set.>

An intellectual grouping of items, primarily used by individual users to create groups of items or favorites. 

Features

    • Nested User Collections  
    • A bookmark-like approach to grouping items
    • A User Collection can be shared with others in some way or kept private
    • Items within User Collections are not governed by the collection in any way
    • Items can belong to more than one User Collection
    • Items in a repository do not have to belong to any User Collection
    • Items can appear in the same User Collection more than once  (sometimes, i.e. not for Hydra-collections, Curate or Worthwhile.)
    • Ordered items (sometimes, i.e. not for Hydra-collections, Curate or Worthwhile.)

Primary uses:

Researcher who creates a group of intellectually related items for a research purpose. Example:

Professor who creates a group of items for a particular course or presentation. Examples: Art History professor creates an group of images for a lecture. A history professor creates a playlist of audio and video for an entire course. 

Audio and Video playlists.

Example apps:

Northwestern's DIL application has "Image Groups" which allows users to create ordered groupings of images for use in class presentations or personal research. These groups can be kept private or made public. Image Groups can contain other Image Groups created by that user. These images groups are not discoverable by search or facet, but can be accessed via direct url

Curate "Collections" enable users to create an intellectual grouping of favorites. Anything that is discoverable can be collected - not just content the user owns. Collections are discoverable via facets. Collections can be private, shared with individuals, or with the public. Items within the collections are viewable only as permitted to any individual user. <comment from Linda Newman, Cincinnati: Nested collections can be confusing if Collection A can belong to Collection B,  and Collection B can also belong to Collection A – this is allowed now in Curate.  This may be a question of implementation, and not the model, to avoid redundantly listing members of a collection on a show collection page.  It is clear from our local use cases that users want to be able to create nested collections, or that is, sub-collections.><comment from Lynette Rayle, Cornell: This will be addressed by PCDM which does not allow a collection to be added to a collection if it is already in the ancestor path.  If you do colA.members << colB, you will not be allowed to do colB.members << colA.

Cornell If Collection Permissions are added to collections allowing collections to have visibility set to private, institution, or public, we would define User Collections (Sets) as any that are marked private.  User Sets would be available to the creating user in Dashboard -> My Files/Collections, adding files to the collection, and showing up in general search results for the creating user only. 

 

Administrative Sets (Admin Sets)

A administrative grouping of items than an administrative unit is ultimately responsible for managing. The set itself helps to manage the items within it. 

Features:

    • Admin Sets can not contain other sets of any kind 

 

<Comment from Linda Newman, Cincinnati – a use case that may call for sets within sets: An individual or group administers a large set of materials which constitutes an admin set.  Different individuals or groups need rights to administer sub-sets of material within the larger set.  Although each subset could be defined as a set without a larger parent, in a large repository this will result in a large flat list of admin sets, without the ability to designate an individual or group as the master editor of one set of sets (but not all sets), able to assign rights to sub-sets of their set.>  

 

    • Only staff with permission to create or manage an admin set can do so
    • All items must be in an Admin Set (there could be a default collection)
    • Items can only be in one Admin Set
    • Admin sets contain a set of default values (permissions, metadata, etc) that can be applied to new objects in the set
    • Any changes to default settings should not automatically change all items in a collection but prompt the user with options
    • Can be faceted for discovery (but it would be nice if that was optional)
    • Order does not matter

Primary uses: 

The Administrative Set primary use is to manage distinct collections of digital objects over time.  Such as: 

  • An archive has 25 collections of digital materials of varying content types, number of items and permissions. 
  • The biology department manages a collection of departmental master theses, a collection of images of biological specimens, and another collection of recordings of notable faculty lectures. 
  • <Use case added by Newman, Cincinnati>A collection manager or archivist has a large set of archival resources, within which the metadata of one grouping of works is being enhanced by student workers.  Those student workers should not have access to a different set of works.  The assignment of rights does not relate in this case to anything users should see as facetable for discovery.

Example apps:

Avalon "Collections" mostly follows the feature list above. 

Cornell Hundreds of thousands of documents are uploaded in batches.  Each batch would be an Admin Set.  A team of metadata specialists and librarians curate a collection.  Ultimately, once metadata updates are complete, the works/files will be added to the Display Set to make them available to the public.  If Collection Permissions are added to collections, the Admin Sets would be shared with editing permissions for the metadata team group.

 

Display Sets (Curated Sets)

A Display Set is an intellectual grouping of items that a curator (or person who has the rights to) creates to aid in the discovery and presentation of collections of materials. The display set is distinct from User Collections because it's primary purpose is the visual display of Display Sets. The Display Set is distinct from an Admin Set because the Display Set itself does not affect items within it. 

Features:

    • Supports hierarchical display of collections in facets
    • Items in a repository may be in more than one Display Set
    • Items in a repository do not have to be in a Display Set
    • Display Sets can contain other Display Sets
        

Primary uses:

A curator makes a library collection of Maps of Africa, some of which are contained in different collections. 

The Biology Department has a collection of departmental masters theses and wants viewers to navigate the collections via facets like this:

  • Biology Department
    • Master's Theses
      • 1972
      • 1973
      • 1974

 <Example added by Linda Newman, Cincinnati:> The Archives Department has described an archival gift using the (up to 12?) levels of hierarchy supported by ArchivesSpace to support accession, box, folder, series, etc.  The Archives Department wants viewers to be able to navigate this archival resource in the repository using the same hierarchy.

Example apps:

Cornell Documents curated using Admin Sets will be released to the public via Display Sets.  If Collection Permissions are added to collections, the Display Sets would be any collection that has a visibility permission of public.