The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln Interface: A Case Study

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We have hosted the online version of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln for a number of years. Recently, the staff at the Papers of Abraham Lincoln decided to add additional Lincoln writings – some found in the Making of America, others that they are having digitized – to their online collection. However, they wanted the Collected Works to remain searchable alone, as that has been widely used and contains primarily Lincoln’s own writing, whereas the other texts contain some of Lincoln’s words interspersed among the authors’ own prose discussing Lincoln, history, etc.

Here’s what the search interface looked like initially:

[edit] Repurposing the genre restriction

The most expedient way to add a search restriction to a collection is to repurpose the existing genre and gender restrictions. Since there are only two choices here (in the Collected Works or not), the gender restriction probably could have repurposed here. However, since this change is in response to outside input, there could easily be more changes ahead as the Papers of Abraham Lincoln staffers come up with additional possibilities for text groupings to be offered to users; using the genre restriction seemed a better long-term choice.

In order to use this restriction, DLXS requires a map of the region to look in for the identifying values, and then individual maps for each restriction to list out the search strings to be found in that region and the label you would like to appear in the interface. (The choice of “All” is there by default.) It was necessary to examine the collection carefully to find what could distinguish the Collected Works from all the other texts. It needed to be something that was identical in all the other texts (so individual IDs or titles were out) and yet different in the Collected Works. Because of changing encoding practices over time, the FILEDESC PUBLISHER values were different in the two batches of texts:

In the Collected Works, the publisher of the electronic file was listed as University of Michigan Digital Library Production Services .

In the other texts, the publisher of the electronic file was listed as University of Michigan Library.

Had such a distinction not been readily available, something would have had to have been added to the HEADER to facilitate these groupings. In fact, if it ends up that further, more fine-grained restrictions are desired, such metadata changes could still be a possibility. As it is, the following mapping was added to the lincoln.map file to describe the region in which the restriction search would take place:

   <mapping>
     <label>genre</label>
     <synthetic>GENRE</synthetic>
     <native>region PUBLISHER not within region SOURCEDESC</native>
     <nativeregionname>PUBLISHER</nativeregionname>
   </mapping>

These mappings order the labels in the pulldown menu and indicate the string that should be searched within the region mapped above:

   <mapping><genreorder>1</genreorder><genrelabel>Collected     
   Works</genrelabel><genrenative>University of Michigan Digital Library Production   
   Services</genrenative></mapping>
   <mapping><genreorder>2</genreorder><genrelabel>Other texts</genrelabel><genrenative>University of     
   Michigan Library</genrenative></mapping>

Next, collmgr was changed to indicate that there needed to be a genre restriction; this is done by adding the word “mapped” to the singlegenre field and checking in the collection.

Here is the result:

These are not, however, genres per se. I wanted to change the label to something more relevant to the choices the users were being offered (and yes, the collection name will be changing as well, but they haven’t provided that yet). Labels like this are contained in the langmap file found in /l1/web/t/text. To override the labels available for all of Text Class in general, a langmapextra.en.xml file was placed in /l1/web/l/lincoln containing the following:

   <ColLookupTables>
      <Lookup id="searchforms">
         <Item key="searchforms.str.19">Restrict to volumes:</Item>
     </Lookup>
   </ColLookupTables>

While that is not ideal label either, it does give them something neutral to respond to and possibly change. Here’s what we have now:

[edit] Match search form colors to new index page color scheme

Lincoln staffers provided a new design for the index page, to match the redesign of their own website. In order to tie the search pages in with the new color scheme, the gray bar holding the main navigation tabs was changed to bright blue. This was done in the textclass-specific.css file in /l1/web/l/lincoln/ . The background-color for the mainnavcell and the background-color for the navcolor was changed to #39478e;.

   /* STYLES FOR NAVIGATION AND MENUS   */
   td.mainnavcell {
    background-color: #39478e;
    padding-left:20px;
    padding-right:20px;
    border-bottom: 1px solid #666666;}
   
   .navcolor { background-color: #39478e; }

This makes the bar solid; these could have been set to two different colors to have individual tabs against a contrasting background.

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