Last Tuesday Holly and I gave a presentation at the ELO Salon hosted by Deena Larsen about the Electronic Literature Repository. The lab has been managing the site since its creation and is now in the process of moving into phase 3 of its development. The Repository is envisioned as the next generation exhibition and preservation space that will function as an open-access, online library/museum/archival site. Created in 2018-2019 with seed funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Repository currently holds 26 collections of 2207 pieces of born-digital literary art. The works held in the Repository include a wide variety of genres, such as hypertext novels, poetry, and essays; kinetic poetry; animated text; interactive fiction; net art; literary games; virtual and augmented reality narratives; interactive novels; and mobile narratives, to name a few.
Phase 1 saw the development of the site for the seven collections managed and/or owned at the time by ELO and the migration of the works’ metadata to the site using the MODS schema. Phase 2 of the project resulted in the development of a user-friendly interface, the creation of new page templates for the site, and the re-organization of works into six collection categories. This phase of the project was undertaken by a six person team of graduating seniors from the CMDC Program this fall working under the direction of the lab. Holly Slocum designed the interface that was turned into wireframe and then a high fidelity prototype, both of which underwent UX/UI testing numerous times. During this period the collections grew from seven to 26 with 2207 total works. At the same time, physical and digital archival material associated with the works were donated to ELO by authors/artists and scholars reflected in the collections.
Phase 3, which will be completed in May 2021, will see the build out of the new interface, the production of collection pages to include videos about author/artist and scholar donors and their collections, visualizations of the collection data and interactive 3D models of physical artifacts associated with the works, individual pages that provide detailed information about each work and a link for downloading those for which we have permission to share (approximately ¾ of the site), and the overall improvement of the site’s search engine. A team of 44 people are involved in this phase of the work. Since October 2020, ELO received four more collections not yet ingested, bringing the total number to 30.
I am proud of the work Holly and the students have done and am excited to share the design of the landing page with you.
