The Cornell DASH! and the Discovery and Access (D&A) teams collaborated to integrated linked data into the author knowledge panels and the author and subject pages.  For our first round of prototypes, we received feedback from the user representatives around which features and data they found useful and which they thought should be improved or removed.  After we shared our revised prototype,  we also received some suggestions that could be incorporated into possible future work.

Summary of feedback

The feedback on our initial prototype can be classified as covering multiple areas: (a) features and data that were deemed useful and relevant, (b) concerns which could be addressed by technical improvements or design changes, and (b) concerns around data quality, comprehensiveness, and alignment with the catalog.   We present some of this feedback below, with some comments regarding possibilities for additional development for some of these points.

  • Useful and relevant features
    • Biographical information for authors was considered useful.
    • Representatives liked some of the mockups that showed a consistent design between the author and subject pages where the layout was closer to the original author prototype.
  • Technical improvements or additional design/development needed
    • The Histropedia timeline was not loading completely for some users or seemed sensitive.  One of the developers saw similar behavior when there appeared to be problems loading external content due to cross-origin or AJAX-related issues. 
      • If we intend to use a timeline in the future, we could further debug this issue and also consider alternative libraries if need be. It is possible that addressing the content loading would allow the timeline to load completely for all users. 
    • The publication timeline and influence graph did not allow users to further interact with library content. 
      • For example, improvements could include allowing users to click on a resource in the publication timeline and see related catalog entries, or to click on the influence graph and see catalog entries for that author.
    • The prototype catalog item page displayed info buttons next to subject headings after breaking the headings out into their components.  The representatives did not like how the subject headings were broken out in this fashion.
    • The subject heading knowledge panel showed narrower headings.  One suggestion was to have those headings be links.
    • Clicking on the map and zooming in did not link to catalog resources. 
    • The subject heading map and timeline view did not seem helpful in certain cases, such as that for World War II.  On the other hand, clicking "display all" seemed to show too many subjects which exceeded the scope of the subject which was the focus of that page.
      • It should be noted that the World War II event mapped to "Earth" which resulted in no countries being associated on the map.  This seems to be a data mapping issue which we would need to address separately.
    • One suggestion was to use a different label than "view more info" for the knowledge panel link leading to the author and subject pages given that not all authors had much more biographical information added from external sources.
  • Data quality, comprehensiveness, and alignment with the catalog
    • The influence graph was deemed unbalanced and arbitrary.  One comment was the list of influences didn't indicate sources or link to articles.  Another example showed that Mozart had a small list for people who were influenced by them. 
    • At times, the publication timeline seemed incomplete.  For example, the timeline for Mozart did not show the earliest editions and the timeline for Beethoven seemed to show only a few modern editions of a single work. 
    • Representatives had questions around how the publication timeline aligned with catalog content.  Would users perceive the publication timeline was comprehensive in its display of editions? Would they think the first edition displayed was the first ever edition available?  Are these publications available at Cornell?

We also received feedback about additional possibilities for work when the representatives reviewed the final production version of author knowledge panels and author and subject pages.

  • Suggestions for future work
    • Although the original layout for subject info buttons was not well received, there was still some desire to see subject info buttons.  We noted that more design work was required in this area if we were to pursue adding info buttons for subjects.
    • Currently, only the author designated as the primary author in the MARC has an info button provided.  This decision pre-dates DASH! work.  One suggestion was to add info buttons for other contributors as well.  If we were to pursue this route, we would need to consult with our index engineer and D&A team to see how best to proceed.

Feedback slides

The user representatives provided their initial feedback in the form of slides showing screenshots of examples they wished to highlighted.  These slides are available here. Additional feedback referenced above was provided in email conversations. 

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