Veridian Director Stefan has just returned from a whirlwind trip to the states where he hosted a user group meeting and caught up with customers in Washington DC, spent time with partners in Minneapolis, and even managed to squeeze in some sights.
We’re lucky to work alongside some pretty wonderful institutions across America, from the State Libraries of Washington, Virginia and Colorado to the Universities of Illinois, California and Pennsylvania to name a few. Many of our key industry partners are also in the US.
With the team of Veridian engineers based here in New Zealand, Stefan’s trip was a great chance to connect with some of our customer and partner community, hear feedback and gather ideas and wish lists.
We were chuffed to get a lot of positive feedback from across the board, in particular for our practice of assigning a dedicated engineer to manage each Veridian digital collection project:
“Our customers really appreciate having one person to look after their collection, and the great working relationship that develops. Hearing this feedback was a nice validation of our support model, with good continuity of the same people supporting the same customers for a long time.” says Stefan.
At the Veridian user group meeting Stefan shared the latest Veridian features:
What's new in Veridian?
New bootstrap-based User Interface (UI)
- Much better support for small screen devices (Google favours responsive collections)
- Much better support for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1)
- Utilizes HTML5
- Much easier to customize with features and brand design elements
- And it looks nicer!
Enhanced crowdsourced User Text Correction (UTC) statistics.
- Of course UTC is not new to Veridian. For many years now, users have been helping edit the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) that identifies search terms on a document. This is great for collections with damaged pages or poor quality microfilm scans. So what’s new? In addition to helpful statistics like showing how many lines of text have been corrected within a collection and lists of top text correctors, we have now added some enhanced UTC statistics:
- Progress tracking. It’s now possible to see how close to "completely correct" any article, page, or issue is, and even how "completely correct" an entire publication/title is, or an entire collection. This taps into the natural human desire to finish a task, and gives further motivation for people to spend time correcting text.
- Display a list of recommended items to be corrected to meet your project goals. If you have specific parts of your collection which need correcting, you can now create a customized list to direct users to those items as a priority.
- Show the most recently corrected items and who contributed.
IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) Implemented
- Veridian (as an IIIF server) has been developed to support both IIIF Image and Presentation APIs.
- This allows interoperability – so any IIIF-compliant viewer or application can consume and display the images, text, and metadata in your collections.
- It cultivates shared technologies for both client and server, to allow interoperability across and between repositories.
- IIIF empowers third parties to use your content in new and interesting ways.
Improved privacy to comply with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)
- Veridian has new and improved privacy policies, with much clearer information on what personal information is collected and how it’s used.
- Users must now “opt in” to some features (notably search history) that were previously enabled by default.
- No more AddThis widget!
Other new stuff!
- Direct ingest of PDFs (especially born digital)
- Open Sea Dragon viewer
- Clipping tool
- On-the-fly PDF generation
New ideas and future plans
The Veridian user group also got a first look at some new ideas we’re working on behind the scenes.
We’ll be rolling some of these ideas out as they’re developed further. Think tag clouds, search result graphs, direct editing of UI text, exporting from Veridian to METS/ALTO and much more...
Excited yet? So are we.
A big thank you to everyone who connected with Stefan on his trip. It’s a pleasure to be collaborating with such a great group of people and organisations.
If you missed Stefan and would like to get in touch feel free to send him a message.