Browsing by Subject "The Portal to Texas History"

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    Digital Repository 2.0: Lessons Learned and Applied
    (2009-05-27) Nordstrom, Kurt; Fredericks, Brandon; University of North Texas
    The Portal to Texas History at The University of North Texas Libraries is a comprehensive system for storing and providing access to a very large number of digital objects of historical significance to the state of Texas. The Portal is currently in its second iteration of development, and in this presentation we hope to examine some of the lessons learned from our initial efforts and how they shaped the decisions made in the current system and the future. We will briefly overview the first system that was put in place, and goals that we had in mind for it. We will cover some of the ways that it was successful, and some of the limitations that we encountered. The things that we will highlight about the former system include: Data Model Overview of the old format and limitations encountered. Technologies Utilized Issues with products that have a small user and developer base. Our XSLT experience. Architecture A look at the single-machine model and how it relates to scalability and redundancy. Development and Workflow The “learning project management as we go” adventures. Next, we will cover the goals behind the current version of the Portal. As there are several aspects of the system, we’ll be looking at different areas of importance that drove our decisions. The topic areas will parallel those covered in the previous system. Data Model The improvements made to our current data format, based on the limitations of the old format. Technologies Utilized Technologies we used to build our new system. Reasons for selecting these specific technologies. A brief overview of the potential of web frameworks, focusing on Django. Architecture Explanation of and benefits of the “shared-nothing” approach. Scalable and Deployable. Development and Workflow Moving from one developer to several. Content management and workflow tools and procedures. Division of tasks and collaboration. The motivation behind “rolling our own”. Our goal in this presentation is not so much to present a “this is how everybody should be doing it” argument, but rather to highlight some of the issues that we encountered and our approaches to resolving them. It is our hope that other groups can learn from our mistakes and successes as they seek to implement their own Digital Repository systems.
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    Redesigning the Portal to Texas History: A User-centered Design Approach Involving the Genealogical Community
    (2009-05-28) Murray, Kathleen; University of North Texas
    In 2007, the Digital Projects Unit of the University of North Texas Libraries began a two-year effort to redesign the interface to the Libraries’ Portal to Texas History. The Portal provides a digital gateway to collections of historical and cultural materials from Texas libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and private collections. It contains primary source materials, including maps, books, manuscripts, diaries, photographs, and letters. The Portal went online in 2004 with five collaborative partners contributing to four collections of materials related to Texas history and culture. These collections were comprised of 489 objects represented by 6,688 digital files. By 2008, the Portal included 34 collections from 91 contributing partners. Its collections include 40,089 objects and 324,023 digital files. Likewise, usage has grown from approximately 1,000 unique visitors per month in 2004 to 105,000 per month in 2008. Keeping pace with this growth occupied the Portal’s support staff during the early years and precluded major enhancements to the user interface. By 2007, the original interface of the Portal needed to be refurbished; it was dated both in terms of its look-and-feel and its feature-functionality. Additionally, the Portal’s underlying infrastructure had increased its capability to support features not possible in the original implementation. It was decided to redesign the interface using a user-centered design approach. Previous research indicated that family history researchers are a significant, growing, and under-studied user group of online cultural heritage collections. Believing this applicable to the Portal’s user population, funding was obtained from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to study the information seeking behavior of persons conducting family history research in order to identify their functional requirements in regard to the Portal to Texas History. These requirements would serve as the basis for redesigning the Portal’s user interface. Members of local genealogical societies were recruited for the redesign effort. The user studies included individual interviews, focus group discussions, and usability tests of the existing Portal. Analysis of the data from these studies informed a set of functional requirements for the redesign effort. The requirements are specific to typical functional areas of a digital library, such as searching, browsing, evaluating search results, and navigating, but also include requirements in the areas of metadata practice, obtaining objects, getting help, and contributing comments. Users’ requirements were classified as either: feasible in the near term, feasible in the long term, or not feasible. This classification highlighted the gaps between user expectations and realistic satisfaction of those expectations by the Portal to Texas History, which is typical of many online cultural heritage collections. These insights are a direct result of the user studies and demonstrate the importance of such studies for digital libraries. This presentation will report the major findings of the research and the current status of the redesign effort.