Bluepages

The bluepages finally started to take more shape and direction after a couple of meetings with Sally and the team. The layout that inspired the initial design was the Really Wild Flowers website.

 

One of the documents that highlight the BRII blue pages layout considerations / ideas [google doc – need authorisation for viewing] can be read online for start.

 

The intial ‘blurb’ for the tabs can be found on the Bluepages content for website [google doc – need authorisation for viewing]

 

A very general idea was crated with the Balsamiq Mockups application and the screens created are below:

 

Homepage mockup

Homepage mockup

 

  • The Homepage had some alterations from the group, the search box on the top will include/assume basic search from People, Department and Projects.
  • The tab Advanced Search will be renamed to “Search by…” to make it easier and more obvious for the user
  • The tab How to Contribute will be aggregated to the tab “Add your data”
  • The main blurb on the page will be shorter, almost like a “punch line” for the Bluepages
  • Mouse over the Research Activity will open little ‘tooltip’ with more information about what is considered a Research activity (projects, contracts, grants, clinical trials, awards)

 

Browsing by People

Browsing by People mockup

 

Profile mockup

Profile mockup

 

  • The source of information is to be moved to the top of the page, to make it obvious where it came from
  • The reporting missing or incorrect information will have more functions (or more buttons, TBC)
  • Button “Do you know this person? Ask them to update their profile!”, “Is this you? Claim your profile!”

 

We have discussed a few features and functions that can be beneficial for the bluepages (atm only ideas and we’ll try to add as much as possible, but not 100% confirmed that all the features below will be on the final bluepages), information came from a list of features from existing systems:

 

  • Add your data – simple registration (name, login, email, pwd) then goes for the second step of webauth to add info in the registration form (entering more information on the profile).  First “edit” of the information through the web becomes ‘unverified’ until we do a manual verification of the profile.
  • One line – tweeter style – focus on the question: “What are you working on today?”
  • Allow owner of profile to attach web photo/avatar
  • Import colleagues/collaborators – allow user to mark collaborators that are in the Bluepages
  • Send invitation to colleagues / share this
  • Allow short / full profile and user to switch visibility of parts of his/hers profile
  • % of completeness (team to define which items will add to 100%) only shown to the profile owner when is logged in
  • Rank of contributors – mispelling corrections, etc.
  • ‘Contact this person’ link on profile – this will redirect to the Oxford contact list (link to search that result close matches) or to twitter account if person has one
  • Possible widgets like Dopplr, Flickr, Facebook, etc.
  • Faceted search, search by author/add author, all/any of these; refine your search/search again; search order/reorder results
  • Mouse over for more details on short descriptions/abstracts of publications, for example
  • Recent activity (searches done) – user can turn on/off and clear (this uses session information, so it will be reviewed in the future)
  • Subject areas (graph like) on department pages to see their breakdown
  • Department/group page – possible to send email to the administrator
  • Atom feed (alerts of changes on the profile, eg: new publications)
  • List of journals this person has published in (pretty graph? – Scopus style). Example: this person publish 3 articles on X journal, 10 papers in Y journal, 2 articles in Z journal.
  • Display of documents/books and publications (getting information from libraries and Amazon) – List8d project illustrate that, see the video below:

 

List8D from Mark Fendley on Vimeo.

Our submission for the Dev8D Developer Decathlon

Medieval Libraries of Great Britain

Medieval Libraries of Great Britain (MLGB) is a one year project (pilot) of a collection from a person checking the books, where they came from, check how things moved between libraries. Quite systematic format identifying the objects and cross references.

  • tracking locations of manuscripts
  • dynamic resource to help annotation
  • parse the code to find book/location/etc.
  • check catalogue author (librarian)

A bit more about the Medieval Libraries of Great Britain

For the remains of medieval British libraries, the scholar must deal in fragments. Libraries are attested first by their surviving books and second by surviving medieval catalogues of the collections. Our aim is to bring together these complementary fragments in a resource that will enable an integrative reading of the evidence. The Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues [hereafter Corpus], a major project to publish the medieval catalogues of British libraries, is now within sight of completion. As a complement to this, it will be necessary also to update the standard research tool that records extant manuscripts according to evidence of their medieval library provenance, Neil Ker’s Medieval Libraries of Great Britain [MLGB]. The opportunity exists to integrate these two strands in a single innovative digital resource. Completion of both strands will take several years, but we are bidding now for a pilot project to test that an electronic edition is feasible for Medieval Libraries of Great Britain in order to prove the viability of the integrated project.

 

The encompassing research objective is to use books and libraries—which have a tangible reality and meaning to modern scholars—as a vehicle to enrich our historical understanding of the texts written and read in the middle ages, their contexts, and all that they open up for the student. Our task is to move that tangible understanding of medieval books forwards. From the application of physical codicology to gain a better understanding of books and the making of books, it is desirable to apply a fuller understanding of books to the composition and circulation of texts. This will contribute to the framing of an overall picture of medieval British library history as well as providing detailed information on particular libraries, particular books, and also individual texts across the whole range of subjects read over the longue durée of the middle ages. It underpins all study of medieval learning.

 

Further, most scholarly and much literary reading and writing in the middle ages depended on host-institutions which owned and maintained libraries, often for centuries. Such institutions were not changeless, nor were their books, and our date-range for the middle ages extends from the earliest available evidence of provenance or documentation to the break-up of most religious institutions in England between 1536 and 1547. This period encompasses the transition from the manuscript as the normal form of book to an age in which print had taken over in almost all contexts. In Great Britain no medieval library survives entire, but surviving books that bear evidence of provenance can be listed to form a virtual library, something achieved by Neil Ker in Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, now the standard work of reference for contextualizing books and their texts. We seek to move the analysis of such lists forward by making it possible to use them more flexibly and more fully in an electronic medium. Extant library catalogues made in the middle ages between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries provide a complement by showing the whole contents of a lost library at a particular moment and often, in the later middle ages, their arrangement on shelves. The Corpus of Medieval Library Catalogues has hugely advanced our ability to interpret these documents while fully deploying the complementary evidence of those books, manuscript or printed, that survive and can be cross-matched. The documentary evidence taken as a whole allows a systematic and typological approach to libraries and their contents that permits extrapolation beyond their surviving contents. We can project what a library of a certain type would have been like at any particular period from a synthetic reading of fragmentary evidence, and draw comparisons with libraries attested by richer evidence. In addition, the cumulative overview now emerging of what works were available where and when, with a similar possibility of projection, allows a more systematic—yet also physically grounded—view of the learned culture of the middle ages than traditional methods ever could.

 

Work of this kind has been strongly associated with Oxford since the 1930s when Roger Mynors and Richard Hunt conceived both the Corpus and MLGB. The Bodleian Library holds the record cards from seventy years’ work on the provenances of medieval English books, which will be freely available to us. The Corpus has been based in Oxford since 1990. For both aspects of the work, the collection of manuscript catalogues and Handapparat for identifying texts, shelved together in the reading-room known as Duke Humfrey, was designed for this purpose by Richard Hunt and is more complete and more accessible than can be found in any other British library. The approach to medieval books and libraries developed here has gone much further than in any other country, and the kind of integration here produced would not yet be possible elsewhere. Through meetings with a carefully chosen consultative panel, we aim not only to optimize the usefulness to scholars of our own work but also to spread the word to other countries in Europe where similar evidence awaits exploration.

Cultures of Knowledge

Cultures of Knowledge – an intellectual geography of the seventeenth-century republic of letters – similar to electronic enlightment (Sue will be working on the CoK project).

About: letters of thinkers/leaders of the time. Who said what to who: correspondence network. The letters can be in fragments, sent to multiple persons, maybe books, diaries, etc. (Think about what else can be added to the “buket”, digitization we might hold)

 

Idea to have a timeline of a person:

  • events on calendar
  • where they are
  • who they are talking to

 

Things/ideas that could be done:

  • framework
  • object model
  • system online ideally people being able to edit (check TEI markup)
  • standalone that help people to digitize then upload the manuscripts
  • have political map that could be overlayered to show the movements at the time (enhancement)

(check The European Library)

 

Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

 

Structure

Part I.  Introduction and overview

I.1  Disciplinary context: a fruitful crisis of identity
I.2  Institutional context: an interdisciplinary opportunity
I.3  Research focus: correspondence networks
I.4  The local dimension: exploring and preserving Oxford’s resources
I.5  The international dimension: networking resources elsewhere
I.6  Digital infrastructure: publication, dissemination, coordination and further collection
I.7  Local and international meetings: refining analytical frameworks

Part II.  Research projects

Preamble: Justification (a) of calendars, (b) of editions

Part II.A: Exploring, developing, preserving and publishing Bodleian resources
II.1  Digitization of existing Bodleian catalogue of 17th-century ms correspondence
II.2  Calendar and edition of the correspondence of John Aubrey (1626-1697)
II.3  Calendar and edition of the correspondence of John Wallis (1616-1703)
II.4  Calendar the correspondence of Martin Lister (1639-1712)
II.5  Opportunities for future development

Part II.B: Linking and developing resources elsewhere
II.6  Calendar of correspondence in the papers of Samuel Hartlib (c.1600-1662)
II.7  Calendar and digital archive of the letters of Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670)

Part II.C: Pooling resources in Oxford and elsewhere
II.8  Nucleus of a union catalogue of seventeenth-century intellectual correspondence
II.9  Opportunities for future development

Part III.  Scholarly meetings

Preamble
III.1  Annual Seminar (2009, 2010, 2011)
III.2  Workshops and conference on ‘Intellectual Networks’ (2009-10)
III.3  Conference on ‘Intellectual Geography’ (2011)
III.4  Conference on ‘Cultures of Knowledge’ (2012)

Part IV.  Digital infrastructure

IV.1  Overall architecture
IV.2  Catalogue storage
IV.3  Data entry / editing tools
IV.4  Data import
IV.5  Website
IV.6  Technical support staff
IV.7  Physical infrastructure