A little over a week ago a gave you a homework assignment in the midst of a very busy season. You are a fantastic advisory committee! Almost everyone has taken time out to really push our growing system, and we have generated a number of questions and requests. Please review the comments below, especially the items marked “QUESTION,” which are questions for you, the advisory committee.

Where you see “ACTION ITEM” I plan to fix something that really needs fixing. Where you see “RECOMMENDATION” I have a fairly strong feeling about something, but you are welcome to argue for the alternative. If I contradict myself, well then, I contradict myself. You may contradict yourself too! I won’t mind. What I really need is feedback. Email responses (especially to QUESTIONs to efc@clst.org. Thanks!

Comments and Responses

http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/mhs502

legitimate error in the title!

embedding a remote image

• ACTION ITEM: disable embedding of remote images
• links to images on other servers can act as “trackers” on our site, bad news

can we have comments in reverse chrono?

• Yes.
• QUESTION: Should comments appear in chronological or reverse chronological order?
• Chronological order can facilitate reading a conversation between commenters.
• Reverse chronological is more blog-like and also puts the comment form at the top of the page where it might be prefaced with a welcoming message.

http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/otter261

links offsite work

• QUESTION: Do we want to allow links to offsite pages?
• RECOMMENDATION: yes.
• people might want to link to legit further resources, wikipedia comes to mind

hidden html possible

• ACTION ITEM: disable hidden html
• this allows people to add things to our page we don’t see easily, bad news

Are we going to have anything on the pages saying who and what the Minnesota Digital Library is?

• RECOMMENDATION: no.
• Embedding in the MDL look and feel should be enough. Remember, people only come here via Reflections. Eventually we even redirect the homepage back to reflections.

Do we want to talk presentation before going public?

• RECOMMENDATION: yes!
• We should discuss the rollout plan, for sure.

How about an explantion of why we are doing what we are doing? Or an explanation of what we hope to do with this stuff.

• RECOMMENDATION: no.
• This kind of commentary on every comment page (which would be the only way to ensure anyone sees it) would be clutter and (I think) discouraging. We could have an “about discussions” page that lays some of this out. Any suggestions on what you would want to see on such a page?

http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/gust550

wiki formating works

• QUESTION: Do we want to allow users to add formatting to their comments?
• I’m conflicted. On the one hand it might be cleaner to restrict everyone’s contributions to plain text, everyone gets equal weight this way. On the other hand, allowing some formatting gives folks a chance to be more expressive. I tend toward disabling this for neatness. Thoughts?
• I also don’t like the problems of instruction that come from allowing formatting. Then would we have to document the formatting markup?

anonymous input

• note, anyone can type anything into the “Your Name” field, anonymous or misattributed comments are very possible (even likely)
• we will have to be vigilant to prevent abuse of this ability

Really seams to me that the public is going to want an introduction. Also, people are doing some rather technical stuff in these tests. Do we want to set some guidelines for the public when they come in?

• RECOMMENDATION: let a hundred flowers bloom.
• I don’t think we should say much about what is expected. Let’s not pre-judge. Let’s see what happens. Who are we, after all? This discussion section is for the public, not us.

http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/penn329

note, the discussion is on Penn329, not the Penn323 assigned

• this is as we designed, the discussion is ending up attached to the whole work, not the individual page
• no comments are possible for a specific page

what if we want to comment on a specific page? say specific pages from a plat book?

• It would be pretty complicated from a Reflections interface perspective to allow both attaching comments to “pages” of compound docs and to the “whole” compound doc. We made a choice to attache to the whole a few weeks back. We could change our mind and attach only to individual images. But it would be much more difficult to allow both.
• QUESTION: Should we change our mind and attach to “pages”?
• RECOMMENDATION: no.

http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/naa132

long comments work

more metadata please

• This is a technical issue. We could probably get more metadata onto this page, but all the metadata resides on the page “before” already. I’m reluctant to clutter this up with the same information. Just click on the image for more information.
• QUESTION: Should the link “back” to full metadata be more explicit?
• I could easily create a “official details about this image” link (a kind of “click here for details”), for example

What’s that “comments about this item” thing in the blue line above the image at the top of this page? Will that show up somewhere?

• that was just a placeholder, a description not a link
• Perhaps I should try to mimic the links we have up in the “green header” in reflections? I’m not sure I can, but if folks want that I could give it a go.
• QUESTION: Should links in the “green header” reflect Reflections?

One comment I have in regard to these items is that the “place” keeps moving around on that top menu bar. Is there some way to get them to land in a consistent place, whether it’s for a single item or a compound object? Because the typeface on this is small, it makes it hard to find when it moves from place to place.

• In other words, the “green header” on Reflections is confusing to some. That might suggest it is not worth imitating at this stage.

http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/hchm975

note: a wikipedia link and other examples of useful links

links to new internal pages are possible

• ACTION ITEM: disable creation of new pages

A “big question” from Marian, I won’t go into it here!

http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/blue1908

Can we make the title of the page the title of the image rather than its id?

• Yes.
• The id stays short and the title in the window is rarely noticed by users except in their history menus. I, personally, get annoyed by very long window titles since they tend to make my history menu ridiculously wide as well. So I opted for the know short text.
• The id is also unique, while the titles can be similar or the same. I opted for the unique item to go into the window title (and into history). Granted, though, this unique text is also pretty incomprehensible for most users!
• QUESTION: Should we switch to image title in the title of windows (rather than image id)?
• RECOMMENDATION: no.
• Note: Reflections itself is even more uninformative on this score, there the window title is both long and useless: “Minnesota Reflections : Item Viewer” for every single item.

http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/stbm318

Are we going to put things “Post your comments here”? OR are we going to put a title on this page? Are we actually going to design it?

• Well, I did design it… to be simple! :) Maybe it is too simple.
• This seems to connect to the reverse chrono proposal. If we reversed the chrono of the page, then the comment form would end up at the top and some kind of welcoming word could be there too.

http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/irrc1349

note, we land on a discussion of the whole again

• this is a discussion of IRRC 1349 even though we came from IRRC 1945
• this may confuse some users
• QUESTION: Is some kind of explanation needed on discussions of compound documents?

posting nothing works

• ACTION ITEM: disable posting blank comments

What sorts of comments are blocked? If I type inappropriate four leter words or an obscene comment, will it get screened? how? Will we tell people that?

• Nothing at all is blocked up front.
• Anything and everything may be edited after the fact. Much should be if it is vandalism or hateful. Uh-oh, judgement needed. No one shy need apply: we will need to be willing to police.
• QUESTION: What are the rules?
• Does anyone want to propose some policy language to guide us?

http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/nemhc1594

looks like we’ve exhausted folks, good work!

nice new page, Michael!

The Assignment

On December 7th I assigned the following images as homework…

<http://reflections.mndigital.org/u?/mhs,502>
	<http://reflections.mndigital.org/u?/otter,261>
	<http://reflections.mndigital.org/u?/gust,550>
	<http://reflections.mndigital.org/u?/penn,323>
	<http://reflections.mndigital.org/u?/naa,132>
	<http://reflections.mndigital.org/u?/hchm,975>
	<http://reflections.mndigital.org/u?/blue,1908>
	<http://reflections.mndigital.org/u?/stbm,318>
	<http://reflections.mndigital.org/u?/irrc,1345>
	<http://reflections.mndigital.org/u?/nemhc,1594>

Which resulted in the following comments

<http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/mhs502>
	<http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/otter261>
	<http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/gust550>
	<http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/Penn329>
	<http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/naa132>
	<http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/hchm975>
	<http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/blue1908>
	<http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/stbm318>
	<http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/Irrc1349>
	<http://views.mndigital.org/Discuss/nemhc1594>