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Title (goal)
Reasonable curator's administrative interface
Primary ActorLibrarian/archivist/curator
Scope 
LevelUser goal
Story

The curator of Fedora data wants to be able to discover, modify, and ingest all data in the Fedora repository before the curator's organization has had the resources to put into building a personalized, user-friendly special administrative interface. That is, without any bells and whistles, but with more usability than the existing developer-focused Fedora administrative interface, the (non-programming, non-XML expert) curator wants to be able to add one or many items to the Fedora repository, discover one or many items via search, purge one or many items, and modify one or a batch of items. They want to be able to handle new datastreams without necessarily writing special code. They want to be able to at least see a simple field-based editor for in-line XML datastreams, and an upload/view tool for external/managed datastreams. They want to be able to crosswalk metadata fields in those XML datastreams to each other, so, for example, when they are editing the title of an object they do not need to make the same edit in oai_dc:title, local_dc:title, local_vra:title, etc, as you currently have to do in the existing developer-focused administrative interface.

 

Explanation: The number one roadblock that we see when talking to members of our community asking if they want to be partners in our Fedora venture is the lack of an out-of-the-box curator-focused administrative interface for Fedora data. While the response from the Fedora community has persistently been that Fedora is a framework, and user facing interfaces are to be designed by the outside community, the reality is that every single existing administrative tool is designed for specific institutional use cases, usually specific metadata formats (cf. sufia), and don't provide an out-of-the-box view of the data. Right now we are working with one potential Fedora user who is currently spending an enormous amount of money and time to create a minimal user interface before they find out if Fedora is even something that will work for them, because that minimal view of the data and ability to have non-technical people work with it is necessary for them to make an informed decision.

Comments
  1. AWoods: As noted in the description, this is a capability that logically would sit over the core Fedora service. Ideally, we could gather a group of institutions with the same basic need for a generic admin interface, detail the requirements and address the use case within the most appropriate framework, Hydra or the like.
  2. 2019-02: AWoods, Texas A&M's CAP may be a good starting point for fulfilling these requirements (James Silas Creel?)