On Wednesday 2nd July we had the fourth meeting with our developers, which happens at the end of each development cycle (typically lasting 2 weeks). At the beginning of this cycle we agreed that the basic deliverables were:

  • Ingest and index full text and all metadata from a new PDF document
  • Add metadata field search – Title, Author, Collection etc
  • Enable full index of all articles in journal issues for searching
  • Enable editing of all metadata items in Management Interface, and allow certain metadata items to have multiple entries

The functionality was delivered on Wednesday 2nd July. There are some outstanding issues to be resolved for this development cycle, and these will be resolved over the next cycles. This meeting was combined with user evaluation sessions devised to solicit feedback about the way in which the current repository interface is used and to refine the functionality required of the new interface.

There were 7 participants, ranging from novice to expert users of FMO. Each session enabled one participant to use the current interface and comment on its strengths and weaknesses. The feedback from these sessions was very interesting. As we supposed, some of the more esoteric functionality of the current system is not used/understood, and what seems to be required is pretty much what we are developing – a more open system, with greater searchability via search engines such as google, better access from subject portals, and a slightly simpler and more intuitive user interface. Several recommendations for improved functionality were expressed and will be factored into the ongoing development.

The next development cycle will be followed by a development meeting on Wednesday 23rd July. The priorities and deliverables for this next cycle were agreed, and briefly are:

  • Add language as a filter on advanced search
  • Show ‘Document Type’, ‘No. of pages’ and ‘Sourced From’ (formerly ‘Collection’) on search results page
  • Show thumbnail, ‘No. of pages’ and ‘File Size’ on document / journal ‘landing page’ (i.e. metadata detail page), and facilitate ingestion of thumbnail along with document / journal
  • Add css classes to web pages to facilitate page desgin