Present: Ron Brashear, Michelle DiMeo, Anna Headley, Hillary Kativa, Stephanie Lampkin, Cat Lu, Erin McLeary, Sarah Newhouse, Daniel Sanford, Patrick Shea
Absent: Lee Berry, Dave Caruso, Gillian Maguire, Jim Voelkel
Updates
- A target date for the soft launch has been set for July 17th. A detailed set of milestones has been prepared with a Gantt chart. Included in this process are a number of spots for feedback and buy in. Soft launch means we're opening it to IP addresses outside of CHF, but it won't be linked to CHF website. No target date for this yet. No idea what it will look like or what functionality the integration will have.
- After December meeting, everyone agreed to ordering changes. The adjustments to ordering in metadata fields has just been implemented & we are now using an alpha-sort.
- An additional title field has been added. The new rule for foreign language titles is to use the additional title field for the translation. It will take some time but old records using the [ ] method will be adjusted to fit this.
Home Page Design and Collection Development
- Stalled due to complications with rebranding CHF, so cannot finalize any styling or branding. Digital team plans to show Communications/Web Team a mock-up in April and have them sign-off on timeline to soft launch.
- Focused discussion on how to present collections on this short-term digital collections home. Preview of homepage mock-up to spark discussion: FirstDraftforDCC.pptx
- Beckman Collection will be highlighted for funder (Jody showing them in August.) What other categories do we want to use to highlight our collections? Division, Genre or Subjects? Everyone preferred Subject-based categories over Division (used on current website.)
- Display Sets functionality is coming, where we can curate small groupings. Till then, we will link to a page of existing results.
- Categories that suggested in the meeting:
- Scientific Instruments (though some concern that Beckman will overwhelm results)
- Portraits and People (one of the most popular at the Smithsonian & already popular with our web users)
- Scientific Education (not currently being used, but could highlight the Museum's chemistry sets and molecular models, among other things in Library and Archives)
- Alchemy (always popular, spans Fine Art and some Rare Books, will probably include new manuscripts)
- Science on Stamps
- Health and Medicine (more user-friendly option than category Life Sciences)
- Toxicology (another Life Sciences option, could include some digitized works on warfare and insecticides)
- Women in Science (maybe return to this when we have more women throughout history; should also consider models versus actual women scientists; maybe don't want it with Portraits & People)
- Concerns about existing metadata were raised, particularly about how to get it to conform to these new categories. We don't want to make the data worse by applying relevant information only selectively to some items and not others to which they really should be attached. Additional concern is that much of the metadata needs to be cleaned up and standardized across curators because facets across collections aren't working as well as we want.
- Cat and Michelle will work with these suggested categories above and see how they can best highlight the diversity of CHF's collections using some of these.
Rights Information in UI
- Michelle and Cat have been comparing how other institutions present Rights information and many do it next to the Download button, such as Biodiversity Heritage Library, Science and Society, and The Met, and Brooklyn Museum.
- Would it be clearer if we moved Rights Statement under or near Download button? Either text or maybe the symbol associated with the Statement, similar to The Met. Everyone present liked the idea, but Gillian was not there so we couldn't reach a conclusion.
- Should there be additional information such as Contact email address or Licensing information since some items are in Copyright? Most items claiming copyright are in the Museum, though previous conversation suggested they would be Public Domain. Need to revisit conversation with Gillian, maybe a small group concerned with R&R (Hillary, Gillian, Stephanie and Erin)
- Previous conversation indicated we would use Rights Statements and not Licences. If we're licensing, we may want to revisit Creative Commons. Museum currently says they are okay with Educational Use.
- Is the R&R page on the website up-to-date? Hillary says yes, but not so relevant to Hydra because much of it concerns getting new images made, not existing images.
- Will have a follow-up meeting with design mock-ups. Also possible to include a link in Hydra navigation with all relevant information.