Oops, I was supposed to write about this last Thursday when we actually launched. Busy, busy week. So, without further ado - Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing!
So, here is the actual library news story. The site was a year in the making, and still has some content that will be added. An immense amount of hard work was put in by the team. I would like to give a special thanks for all the hard work put in by the project coordinator, Judy Donnelly, Bev Bayzat who handled the data management portion of the project, and Matt McCollow who took over the majority of development responsibilities on the site. Also, many thanks to all of our students who worked on the project - Belinda Hanson, Asiya Zareen, Sherry Sun, and Justina Chong.
Ok, now for the geeky stuff. There are 963 records in the site at the moment, covering approximately 3500 images, audio interviews, and a video tour of Coach House Press. Once again, this collection was built with Drupal and is a sub-site of the overall McMaster University Library Digital Collections site. Users can comment on records and case studies, and logged in users can tag records.
During the development phase of the project, we decided to use the Faceted Search module a lot more than we had used it previously. Most notably in the right hand navigation. When users are in a record, a variety of fields are exposed to the faceted search module, thereby allowing them to discover other similar content based on the metadata from the record.
Finally, Matt put in some hard work during the last week of the project to get Jplayer working in the records which had audio, and Galleriffic for galleries in the “Themes.”
