The Electronic Literature Lab has been busy during its planned Winter Refinement period: 1) enhancing the metadata for many collections held in The NEXT, 2) preserving works produced with Flash and other outmoded software, such MIDI and Java Applets, and 3) completing the “Cite” feature that allows visitors to cite all the works in The NEXT.
Metadata, Preservation, and Citation Feature
To date, the lab has updated the metadata for and preserved works in The frAme Collection, The Word Circuits Collection, and close to 50% of the 369 works in The Turbulence Collection. These efforts bring those collections donated early in the development of the ELO’s Repository to the level of those collected in the last year. Below is an example taken from The frAme Collection that shows the extended metadata for Kate Pullinger and Talan Memmot’s “Branded.”
Note the addition of Authoring Platform, Genre, Sensory Modalities, and other metadata fields that were not included when this work was first added to The NEXT.
Because we pay a fee to Rhizome to use Conifer, and Ruffle continues to improve its ability to preserve Flash works, the lab is meticulously going through all the collections to see if those preserved previously with Conifer may be able to be preserved now with Ruffle. Unfortunately, it looks like only a small percentage can be offloaded to Ruffle, but when we can do this, we notify visitors that we have done so. Below is “Branded” again with the Editorial Note.
Visitors have long been able to export the RIS information to Zotero, Endnotes, and other systems, but now we have made it very easy for them to copy the citation information in both MLA and Chicago Style. Here is what the new feature looks like for “Branded.”
Next Steps & Other News
We are finishing our work with The Turbulence Collection and have also begun work on The Cauldron & Net Collection. The BeeHive Collection and The Riding the Meridian Collection are scheduled to be the next ones we address. I suspect that we will also have time to take care of The Iowa Review Web Collection and The Poems That Go Collection before our Winter Refinement period ends. We will then turn our attention to adding new collections to The NEXT, including The Alan Sondheim Collection, The Rob Wittig Collection, and the 60 additional works in The weak blood Collection. Additionally, we are working closely with Agnieszka to add The Kate Pullinger Collection this summer.
In other news, The Visualizations Space, which has been completely redesigned and programmed will go live in February.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Holly Slocum, the lab’s Senior Designer and Project Manager, for developing the UX/UI for the Citations feature (and everything else she does to keep our projects running smoothly); Richard Snyder, Metadata Specialist and Associate Director, for developing the Citations feature as well as leading the team assisting with the metadata that includes Ruth Woodcock, Arlo Ptolemy, and Ariel Wallace; Greg Philbrook, Tech Specialist, for the programming the Citations feature (and doing all of the backend server development); and Andrew Thompson and Arlo Ptolemy for their preservation work on all of the collections.