January 23rd 2008
Both Scott McGowan and myself had been finding the relationship between the various components of the repository somewhat confusing, and decided we needed a session to work through this. The practical focus of the session was twofold. Firstly to set up a group for the LARC project and tie this in with a workflow in order that materials could be added to the repository by the members of the LARC gerontology project, and secondly to ring-fence the CLA content so that it wasn't externally searchable or browsable by non-approved users.
To achieve the first outcome we adapted a workflow currently in use for the uploading of past exam papers which would allow the gerontology staff members to upload materials and fill in rudimentary metadata. The metadata fields these contributors would see was fixed by creating a metadata subset and attaching this to the workflow. We then tied the LARC workflow to the LARC group and settled on the membership of this group. After a few false starts we finally managed to tie all the roles, workflows and users together correctly and all appears to be functioning as required.
The knowledge we'd gleaned from working this example through was useful in our second task. We knew the ring-fencing process was achieved through assigning the materials to a collection, and such a collection already existed. However, it didn't appear to be functioning as we desired, and materials were still searchable through the web-ct interface and browsable by repository users outside of the CLA group. By combining another new workflow with the user group and the collection we worked out how to correctly orient the CLA material upon upload. This left the issue of the materials already uploaded, and the worry was that we may have to reload them into this new workflow from scratch, thus losing the current URL links. However, upon brief examination we found that we could shift items already in the repository into a collection fairly easily.
So we're now happily au fait with the use of, and relationships between, workflows, users, groups, metadata subsets and collections. Now onto the next task of incorporating the bulk upload function into a workflow......
Posted by Michael @ Keele Pathfinder Team |
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