October

Goobi viewer Digest for October 2021

Coming soon 🚀

Comments revision
Changes to the search algorithm

Announcements

We plan to devote some time in the coming months to reworking search. As a rule, changes in these code areas are difficult to grasp, as they often do not involve visual adjustments. At the same time, they are complex, as a lot of logic must not only be understood, but also translated into algorithms. Several weeks of work then result in a search hit appearing further up or further down the list. At the same time, there are no new buttons or features.

Within the community, several partners have already contacted us to request a change of parts to check the funding. However, there are other points that would be desirable in this context.

These include visual changes and refer for example to the revision of the usability of the simple and the advanced search. But also further developments like a dedicated listing of person and place hits, the integration of DNB Entity Facts, search in content of CMS pages or export of hit lists as IIIF Collection are wishes that have been expressed in the past.

If you are interested in the conception and adoption of individual items, we would be pleased to hear from you!

Developments

Archive view

The archive view has been revised and extended in many places. The first thing that catches your eye is that it now contains colors and logos from the corporate design. This makes it look more natively integrated with the rest of the Goobi viewer.

The icons in the archive plan are now configurable and take over in the default configuration the icons from the archive management plugin of Goobi workflow. A pictogram indicates the nodes and distortion units behind which digitized material is available. In addition, the period of origin is displayed in the tree below a distortion unit, so that a quick chronological navigation is possible.

A completely new feature is the selection and switching between different archival collections. This option is automatically displayed as soon as more than one collection is available.

Along with this revision, the alternative archive tree view has been eliminated without replacement. All the advantages that this alternative view offered have been incorporated into the archive view.

The configuration file has also been restructured in this area and now follows a clearer logic.

Profile

After we revised the user settings last month, this release introduces a profile page for users. There the last activities are listed in descending order, followed by an overview of the reading lists, saved searches and comments.

Furthermore, the naming of the entries in the user menu was checked and revised with this release. It was ensured that these correspond to the headings on the linked pages. Also the breadcrumbs and partly the URLs were checked in the course for the user area. Partially the naming in the breadcrumbs was adjusted and partially also new levels were inserted, so that these are consistent with the URL structure.

The login dialog has not been redesigned in terms of content, but visually. In the last few years we have often received feedback that functionality such as registering a new account or the forgotten password functionality is not easy to find.

We collected the feedback, searched and now found a way to arrange the elements more clearly. Here is a comparison view of the two dialogs side by side:

Accessibility

Accessibility has been further improved and a focus ring now appears when navigating the website using the keyboard and tab. However, if a mouse is used this is not visible. This change allows for faster, visual navigation.

CSS and Javascript Libraries

The management of the CSS and Javascript libraries is now done via package.json and the tool npm. Similar to the Java dependencies with maven, a central place was introduced in which the dependencies are listed with their versions. In conjunction with the tool Grunt, the libraries can now be managed more easily and kept up to date. This change may only be at the end of the digest, it may be short and look inconspicuous, but it is a major milestone on the way to constantly maintained and up-to-date versions of the libraries used.

Version numbers

The versions that must be entered in the pom.xml of the theme in order to get the functions described in this digest are:

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.goobi.viewer</groupId>
    <artifactId>viewer-core</artifactId>
    <version>21.10</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>io.goobi.viewer</groupId>
    <artifactId>viewer-core-config</artifactId>
    <version>21.10</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>io.goobi.viewer</groupId>
    <artifactId>viewer-connector</artifactId>
    <version>21.10</version>
</dependency>