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[EP-tech] Closing the loop with the main university website


Hi, as I said in my last post, I've been working on updating eprints.soton.ac.uk

A small but significant change is that we now import a list of the homepages of current university staff and use that to hyperlink the names of contributors back to the profiles and contact info for those people.

A second is that for some departments and groups, we've added a button to link back to the "research" page for the part of the organisation.

See https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/413656/ for an example of both.

I think this is more important than it first seems, as it makes the page stop being a dead-end and start to lead people into parts of the site where views provide value to the authors and research managers. This has in turn seemed to have increased the perceived value of the repository to them.

We also rejigged the order of the fields to put the catalogue information (date deposited & modified) far down, as most people won't care. Above it is all the various identifiers like DOI, URI, PURE etc. And nearest to the top are the more human-friendly information that should satisfy most readers of the page. People wanting the other info are rarer and more motivated to scroll.

I've also had a stab at making the entire public-facing site more or less "responsive". Our university HTML/CSS templates already provide most of the tools so it's mostly been applying them to the summary (abstract) pages.

Where I had more problems was the search forms, as EPrints builds these in a array to output as a table. I just left this bit unresponsive as the effort didn't seem worth it.

I wouldn't even try to get the deposit and admin pages to be responsive. My assumption is that these are usually used from a laptop or PC.

--
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cjg

University of Southampton Open Data Service: http://data.southampton.ac.uk/
You should read our Web & Data Innovation blog: http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/