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These are the first four implementation priorities for UChicagoNode Year 2 (July 2024 - June 2025)

Note the slight discrepancies in how the home pages for these four sites were mocked up or implemented. These will need to be reconciled talking to Bhavika Chuttar, Web Designer / User Researcher (UI/UX).

For more Year 2 milestones, see UChicagoNode Milestones.

The following provides background information prior to performing design work on UChicagoNode. It was designed for the Web Designer / User Researcher. It is provided here in an edited form as being of value to a Node Web Developer as well.

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 begin work on the first of the implementation priorities indicated above.

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 Web Development, Hosting, Infrastructure and Systems (sections 3 and 4). This is important with respect to the library's goals on how we develop our tools - keeping in mind accessibility and inclusivity for the end user.

In this role, you will be collaborating with Bhavika Chuttar, who is the Web Designer/UX Researcher on the UCNode project, one of the main tools that will be used for prototyping is Figma. It is a collaborative web application that can be accessed via the browser, or even as a native desktop app. Here are some brief, useful articles on the features that you might use as a developer while collaboration:

  1. Figma Dev Mode
  2. Code Connect

Initial collections slated for Node include the following:

[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.

Author: Charles Blair

Created: 2026-10-07 Wed 15:12

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