[Dspace-general] RE: Improvements to Administrator's User Interface

[Scott Yeadon]

Hi Margaret,

Below are our suggestions that ANU would like to see. They are ordered from 
most important to least important.

1. Administration at Community and collection levels
For our implementation we want our users to establish and manage their own 
communities and collections without being able to change communities and 
collections which they don't have administrator access for. Currently there 
is only an overall administrator and we need an additional administrator 
layer.

2. Allow searching on items using metadata searches rather than handles
Item handles really don't mean much to users, when looking for an item 
metadata such as titles and authors is used.

3. Metadata should be configurable at community, collection and item levels. 
Currently only one standard metadata set is available across a single DSpace 
instance.
We would like to be able to allow the creation of multiple simultaneous 
metadata schemas. These schemas should be able to be attached at a community, 
collection and item level. The submission forms can then generated dynmically 
using the metadata schema.
We would like to also be able to create default metadata schema and forms. For 
example when a user selected a type of "image" then default metadata schema 
and forms could be assigned for the submission process rather than the user 
having to select or define a schema, or work their way through irrelevant 
metadata forms.

4. If clicking on the "Add EPerson" button a person is automatically added. 
There is no cancel operation on the Add EPerson screen. The new EPerson 
should not be added unless the administrator explicitly clicks on the "Save 
Edits" button.

5. Would be good to be able to edit items from the Edit collection screen. 
This should allow users to edit items belonging to the collection being 
added. Currently you have to go out of the collection to edit items that 
belong to it.

6. Navigation within multiscreen operations.
The breadcrumb links do not always represent where you are in the function 
hierarchy meaning the back button needs to be used on some occasions. As 
there appears to be problems when using the back button, the breadcrumbs need 
to be complete and session state information needs to be maintained so that 
the back button can be used.

7. When editing authorisations it would speed things up if you could select 
more than one access type. For example if I want a Group to have Read, Write, 
Add access, I should be able to select all thes in one operation rather than 
have to perform three separate operations.

8. On the community, collection, item authorisation pages it would be useful 
to be able to click on the group and have a popup displaying which EPersons 
belonged to the group. Currently you have to go out and back into the Group 
maintenance page to see this.

9. Similar to above, when viewing the groups it would be useful to be able to 
see which collections the groups had access to.

10. Look at performance improvements for update/delete queries, for example by 
using threads or asynchronous background transactions while the user moves to 
the next screen. This may also be an issue for drawing of screens for example 
when a repository has a large number of collections, groups, etc rendering 
may become slow. This could be improved through filtering what is displayed 
by providing search and browse facilities similar to what is currently in 
place for collections.

11. Consistent placement and use of buttons would be useful to avoid 
confusion. For example, on some screens you need to make a change and also 
click an "Update" button whereas on others you only need to make a change for 
it to take effect. On several screens where multiple operations may be 
performed (such as metadata, bitstream registries) the "New" button is placed 
at the bottom of the screen, where it may be better to put it at the top 
since the page returns to the top once the change has been applied.

12. Would be good to be able to apply advanced wildcard authorisation policies 
to collections, not just items and bitstreams.

13. Many of the tables run off the screen making it impossible to view the 
information without scrolling left-to-right. If the table cannot be made to 
fit on the screen it would be useful to allow columns to be hidden (similar 
to the hide/show functionality of tools like MS Excel/Access)

Hope that helps. If you would like any clarification on these requests, please 
feel free to contact me.

Thanks.

Scott.