ArcLight Winter 2017 Project Update

January 17, 2017

This is a brief update from the ArcLight design team regarding further progress on design and timing for additional work in the coming months, including calls for community feedback and contributions. ArcLight is intended be a Blacklight-based environment that supports discovery and digital delivery of information in archives. The project team is using a community-oriented, collaborative  ArcLight Design Process to engage more institutions earlier in the process. We are currently in the Information Architecture phase. 

Drafts of personas ready for feedback. The design team recently completed the creation of a set of six personas, representing common classes of users of ArcLight, including both researchers and archivists. We encourage feedback from the broader community on the personas by January 31, 2017. Please note that the personas are not exhaustive and a list of requirements is still forthcoming (see below). Any feedback should be submitted by email to arclight-feedback@lists.stanford.edu.

Requirements analysis underway. We are continuing our work on the requirements analysis from the existing sources previously developed and compiled (personas, requirements documents from comparable projects, etc.). We hope to complete this work over the next few weeks and will be releasing drafts of these materials for additional feedback as well.

Design sprints for wireframes. To complete work on completion of the Information Architecture phase, our designers Gary Geisler and Jennifer Vine will be working on a set of three, one-week design sprints to focus on the creation of wireframes. We expect this start at the beginning of February and to have all three sprints completed by the end of March.

Tentative development scheduling for minimum viable product and call for community participation. We are also hoping to schedule an eight-week development cycle for a minimum viable product beginning from mid-March to mid-May. We are particularly interested to hear from individuals or institutions that are interested in participating in this first phase of development. Please contact matienzo@stanford.edu if you are interested or have questions about how to best get involved.

Best,
The ArcLight design team:
Gary Geisler, Jennifer Vine, Laura Wilsey, and Mark Matienzo (Stanford University Libraries)
Nabeela Jaffer, Chris Powell, and Mike Shallcross (University of Michigan)
Wendy Hagenmaier (Georgia Tech)