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Title (Goal)Enabling more visual appealing access to items in a collection
Primary ActorHuman
ScopeUI, Collection/Community/Home pages
Level 
Story (A paragraph or two describing what happens)

Sally finds her way to a collection homepage of a photograph collection. She sees the standard item list featuring relatively small thumbnails. She expected a visual gallery view that would have enabled her to flick through larger representations of the thumbnails / actual photographs.

3 Comments

  1. Bram Luyten (Atmire)

    This use case was discussed during DCAT Meeting August 2014

    One participant mentioned that the inability of DSpace to give more visually oriented access to image collections was the main reason to use a different system for a particular collection.

    The call participants briefly discussed Omeka as an alternative. However, it was perceived that Omeka could not function as a visualization layer on top of DSpace, even if DSpace would provide the necessary API's. The Omeka model entails that the actual content should be stored within Omeka itself.

    Example of a more visual oriented DSpace homepage featuring a carousel:

    http://iris.univ-lille1.fr/

  2. dschuster

    When I submitted this type of request I was really thinking more along the lines of this:

    https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/handle/1811/50311

    Being able to browse photograph thumbnails this way is much more appealing than scrolling down the page.  The navigation is very simple as well.  Maybe there could be a way to identify if the collection should use this "view" over the "standard list view" when presenting the results.

    I thought about Omeka as well, but being a very small shop here at Texas Woman's University I have limited resources to bring up another "option".  Having this out of the box makes it so much easier to maintain and allows better functionality for all users.  I hesitate to "customize" my dspace too much as it is difficult to then do upgrades.  Keeping things bland isn't always pretty, but if we can build it in it helps all of us in the long run.

  3. dschuster

    This is a great presentation as well of photos - http://www.twu.edu/inauguration/photos.asp

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