Several invitees met Thursday, Sept 8, from 10-1 at UVM to solicit ideas and opinions on how to make the Landscape Change Program website and collection more useful for everyone involved.
There were three foci for the meeting. Improving the search function, redesigning the display pages, and getting feedback about the type of images that would be useful to add to the collection. We worked independently through some search scenarios, writing down comments, idead, and observations; discussed our results in small groups; then reported back to the full group. After lunch, we discussed as a group the layout of several key display pages.
Afterwards, PI Paul Bierman met with me, Justin Henry, and Ellen Iverson of Carelton College (something of a useability specialist). We talkied about the next steps in implimenting the changes and improvements raised at the meeting.
The original plan was to fix what is there now using student interns from Robert Erikson’s CS148 course. Grant monnies would also allow Paul to hire Justin to fic a few short-term items. However, Justin is of a mind that rather than fix and patch broken code — or start over with the same database — we should start over using Dspace (or similar) as a back-end.
This, of course is non-trivial. Issues raised:
- can Dspace do the job?
- Why Dspace?
- Will CIT continue to support Dspace?
- What about disk spcae for Dspace?
Stay tuned for the exciting answers to these and more.
