Viewing HathiTrust Content in a Bamboo Work Space v. 0.3

Scott Prater, Evguenia Krylova, and Bruce Barton, all working for Academic Technology at UW-Madison, have put up their third iteration of a Repository Browser on the HUBzero test instance hosted by Indiana.

This version shows browsing a collection of titles in a tree like structure that resembles the files and folders view one might find in a file system browser.  Books are represented as folders.  Pages in the book are represented as documents.  Click on book folder and some simple metadata for the book are shown in the righthand panel.  Click on a page, and a page image is displayed there below the metadata. 

Here is screen shot showing the top part of physical page 10 from the 1840 title, The Youth of Shakespeare.

We don't intend the repository browser to serve as a page turner app. The goal is more modest: we want to give scholars a means of previewing books and other objects without having to first pull an object in its entirety into the work space, unpack it, and then load object media elements into a suitable tool to view them. As with the file system browser on OSX, click on a document in the repository browser and you can see a low fidelity preview. This can be enough to verify that you are looking at the right object, that is, the object you want to work on using tools available through the Bamboo work space.

To see this for yourself, go to the bamboo-hub0 test site here: http://bamboo-hub0.dlib.indiana.edu. Register for an account and log in. Go to the myHUB tab and look for the Repository Browser dashlet. Then follow the link to open the Repository Browser. The first time you open the browser you will see an empty list of book marks. Add one — it doesn't matter what you name it (I used "HathiTrust") — and set its path to 'root'. Save the bookmark, then click on the 'root' link to begin browsing the folder tree. (Warning, this way of setting bookmarks is a temporary bit of scaffolding. It will be replaced soon with a means of loading bookmarks gathered in Zotero to bootstrap the browsing session.)