Web Designer User Researcher

This document provides the following kinds of background information prior to design work on UChicagoNode.

A description of the scope of the work
Sites to look at by way of comparison, and what we can learn from them
Sites built in the past for individual digital collections, and what we can learn from them
Brief descriptions of the initial collections which will be going into Node

It also describes the first couple of assignments, which the background information will serve to inform.

Take whatever time is necessary to work through it, since there is a lot here, and it is expected that any questions it raises will be talked through as they arise; it is not expected that it be read without discussion.

-> Read the grant narrative for background on UChicagoNode. The intended audience was the reviewers at the National Endowment for the Humanities, which determined the selection of some of the information presented.

-> Read the presentation on public interfaces to the first UChicagoNode advisory board meeting held on 23 July 2024. This was presented a year into the project, and was well received.

-> Look at the UChicagoNode Milestones document where it indicates UI/UX. That will also give a sense of the timelines for some of what follows.

(1) The first assignment will be to research and design a placeholder home page for UChicagoNode, which currently has this as a placeholder page. (Please note that the official name of the project right now is UChicagoNode, not University of Chicago Node or UChicago Node. That is how it is first listed in the grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities. There it is abbreviated as UCNode, but the official abbreviation right now is Node.) Before doing that, it would be useful to go through the rest of this document by way of further background.

(2) The second assignment will be to research and design the core Node discovery interface across all collections in OCHRE, which functions as the content management system for Node. What those are will be indicated below.

Before undertaking either of the above, become familiar with Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) 1.0: Draft Community Group Report 22 June 2024 as it pertains to User Experience design (section 2). All of this should already be familiar to you; reading section 2 should not take particularly long. I'm particularly interested in section 2.15 in light of what appears to me to be "eye-candy" in some of the sites described immediately below. "Eye-candy" is certainly "tasty", but is it necessary for a good user experience? What is a sustainable middle ground? Sustainability is one of the Library's strategic priorities.

Sites to include in a competitive analysis are

the National Library of Scotland's Data Foundry [1]
the New York Public Library's Digital Collections (see also their new look)
Yale's Lux, which consists of museum and art objects, and was very recently created
the Bavarian State Library (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek), a digital Library of long standing, which exposes its IIIF image manifests so that one can use one's own IIIF image viewer against its collections. This is a nice feature to have. The Bavarian State Library has a bilingual interface, English and German. There are many bilingual sites on the internet; perhaps Node might want to have a multilingual interface.
Also look at the UChicago Library Catalog. This will provide a sense of the flow from search page to a list of search results to a page that expands the results of one search and, for digital items, provides a link to the item. Links for digital items are also provided on the page of search results. Try, for example, "fluting shepherd" to see that in action. (Click on the second search result.) This site was designed after a lot of UX was performed.
Finally, please look at Explore Chicago Collections. This site is a few years old now. It was created by Jell Creative, with significant input from member institutions. Jell Creative composed a case study about the project.

Anything else that you might want to add is fine.

[1] The National Library of Scotland's Data Foundry served as one of our inspirations when writing the grant proposal for UChicagoNode. Of particular note are the projects and tools pages, and the transformative use of collections, e.g., A Song of Scottish Publishing. The transformative use of collections is something we want to enable in Node at some point, but I will want to ask Sarah Ames about how to go about it. There is also a data page, which allows the downloading of both data and metadata for collections, including map and spatial data, which is something Node will contain from the beginning. Note their projects, and the transformative use of collections, e.g., Scottish chapbooks as music.

Initial collections slated for Node include the following:

Guerrilla Television (this is the provisional interface for this collection; see the Guerrilla Television mockups for the agreed-upon design approach)[1]
Mapping Chicagoland (this is the provisional interface for this collection; see the Mapping Chicagoland mockups for the agreed-upon design approach)[1]
the Online Language Archive[1]
the Mesoamerican Languages Collection[1]
the Middle East Photograph Archive (note that the display interface for this collection is Luna; this is not likely to change, for this and similar image collections)
Gregorian Chant Digital Manuscript Collection (currently these are links to PDF files using the Library catalog as the search and display interface)
Islamic Lithographs Collection (these are also links to PDF files from the Library catalog)
the Yerkes Glass Plates Collection, and associated logbooks, when they're ready
the South Side Home Movie Project
Social Scientists Map Chicago (this is an example illustrating the need for the interface to preserve information about each collection)
The Chicagoan (the site includes a page-turner which we will seek to emulate in IIIF)

[1] Note the slight discrepancies in how the home pages for these four sites were mocked up or implemented. These will need to be reconciled.

A core discovery interface will need to search across the metadata for these in Node, and others. Results of searches will take the user to a page displaying metadata about the item; clicking on a link to the item will take them to one of Luna, a IIIF-page turner, or a custom-built collection interface.

There are many collections on the Library's digital Collection and Exhibits page. Some are archival collections, for example, American Recipes, 1855-1905, and Lafayette Manuscripts, 1792-1834. There aren't any of these in Node yet, but they will have to be accommodated in the Node discovery interface (see the first of the Year 3 UChicagoNode Milestones).

Discussed briefly below are the Library's earliest digital collections in their order of creation, highlighting some of the issues that their eventual inclusion into Node will have to address.

Chopin Early Editions

Principal Stakeholder: George Platzman, emeritus professor (now deceased), a noted meteorologist, with a very deep interest in Chopin. Prof. Platzman came to the Library asking how one might put a diplomatic transcription of a catalog he was writing onto the web. After some persuasion we succeeded in making this a database solution, but the original idea didn't entirely disappear; see Home page for the Chopin Online Catalog. If one clicks through this, one will see the amount of work it represents. A reimplementation of Chopin in Node will have to find a way to preserve this. This catalog contains links back into Chopin Early Editions. These will have to be converted into links to Node. This is a matter for a Node software engineer to tackle.

Metadata: MARC records, with the addition of a field for dedicatee.

Back-end technology: Greenstone Digital Library Software. It was difficult to eliminate all traces of what Greenstone "bakes in" to the software from the user interface.

Notes: Chopin Early Editions was the first digital collection built by the University of Chicago Library that is still operative. The first, American Environmental Photographs is now part of the University of Chicago Photographic Archive (UCPA). UCPA is an archival collection, and as can be seen, it is divided into eight "series" or groups, which is typical for larger archival collections. See About the Creation of the Chopin Early Edition Digital Collection for more background on Chopin Early Editions.

Users: Many years ago, John Rink, a musicologist in England, wanted all the TIFF images for Chopin Early Editions. These we sent on a hard drive. Making our data available like this is part of the Node project, although the mechanics of how to do it might vary; today we have Box, which we didn't then. We also received a request from a doctoral candidate for permission to use a Chopin score as part of a dissertation. This we freely granted. Openness to the extent possible is part of Node's and the Library's overall philosophy. Only legitimate rights and permissions issues, such as copyright, performers rights, and ethical concerns, will cause us to constrain a collection's or an item's use: we might not make the collections or items publicly available, but we will allow researchers who register with us to consult the material, provided that any use they make of them obeys the rights and permissions established for them.

The Goodspeed Manuscript Collection

Principal stakeholders: One was a New Testament and Early Christian Literature scholar, interested in the content of the collection; one was an epigrapher, interested in the scribal hands represented; one was an art historian, interested in the images. The interests of all three stakeholders had to be addressed, so this collection represented a challenge in how to do that.

Metadata: Both MARC records and TEI (Text Encoding Initiative full-text encoding in XML).

Back-end technology: Custom.

Users: A few years ago the American Theological Library Association wanted the metadata for all of the manuscripts. We provided the metadata using OAI-PMH, a protocol for transmitting metadata. We plan to provide metadata for materials in Node using the same mechanism. Earlier an Armenian American Chicago businessman requested permission for a copy of an Armenian text, which we freely provided. I infer that this user was an Armenian Christian, so the document being requested represented part of the same's cultural heritage, which is not a use of the collection that we had foreseen.

The Speculum Romanae Magnificientiae

Principal stakeholder: Rebecca Zorach, then a member of the University of Chicago's art history faculty, now the Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History at Northwestern University.

Metadata: VRA Core version 4 had just been introduced in beta. A master's student in the University's MAPH program was hired to use this standard to catalog the prints, providing any needed feedback to its maintainers. This project served as the student's thesis project. After graduation, the student, who already had a library degree, became the director of the Harrington School of Design, now defunct.

Back-end technology: Custom.

Notes: Of particular note are the Itineraries. A reimplementation of this collection in Node will require their preservation, perhaps as a web exhibit with a link from Node. Note also the links in Links. This collection is also present in Luna, which might obviate the need for a customized interface.

For more modern approaches to interfaces see Mesoamerican Languages Collection (people have gone back and forth on the name of the collection) and Online Languages Archive.

Listed below are the initial collections slated for inclusion in Node. (Some priorities might change depending on circumstances.) The ones discussed above were mentioned in order to add to a sense of the breadth of what will ultimately be discoverable through a core interface. They were also presented to give a sense of the variety of stakeholder interests and the variety of uses to which these collections have been put.

The Core Interface will be built around these, and must accommodate others in the queue. The list is in Hive.

Items displayed in the core interface will take the user to a display interface. These are the possible display interfaces at this time: Luna, IIIF, and custom, whether new or existing. Streaming audio and video is currently delivered by Panopto. Page-turning for books is delivered by IIIF.

A general problem is where to put information about each collection if a user is coming to an item from a collection in Node. This information could include background or contextual information, rights and permissions, related materials, etc.

One collection, not yet ready for Node, but far along in its development, the Mesoamerican Languages Collection, will have two target audiences. The first is the scholarly research community, the official communications of which are in English. The second are the indigenous communities whose languages are represented in this collection. Some members of these communities may know English, but the predominantly spoken non-indigenous language will be Spanish. Therefore, the interface will be bilingual, with all functionality available both in English and in Spanish. This is an example where Node will provide a core discovery interface taking users to this collection for display of more information about items of interest, and where the discovery interface for this collection will provide added functionality, that is, the ability to conduct searches in Spanish.

(3) Future assignments will include a design for the Online Publication Service (OPS); see also the UChicagoNode Milestones document referenced above where it indicates UI/UX.