Jean-Gabriel Bankier, President and CEO of bepress
Back at the end of December, we shared some of the exciting development projects we had in the works for the first few months of the year. Continuing with the theme of sharing our development plans in advance, I have more fun news to share with you—our technical team is working on some new features and improvements to your content’s presentation and readership information.
At a glance:
Image Viewer for Panning and Zooming
Earlier this year we added pagination functionality in order to better support browsing on large image collections. Soon we’ll be adding another important browsing tool to make Digital Commons work even better for those special images in your collections: refined image viewing. Panning and zooming has been one of the most sought-after features since we introduced image galleries and we’re excited to bring it to your repositories.
Featured Collections Showcase
Many of you have asked for the ability to highlight premium publications beyond your peer-reviewed journals and series. With this new showcase, you’ll be able to choose which publications you want to feature and easily change it up whenever you desire. Put this one in the category of greater administrative control and presentation flexibility.
New Download Count Filters
In April our systems alerted us to a new wave of machine-generated spiders and bots that were squeaking by our filters and inflating readership statistics; we’ve gone back and cleaned up April article download numbers and introduced more robust filters to keep these new bots at bay and the downloads numbers more accurate going forward. It’s painstaking work, but getting the numbers right is important to all of us.
Version 2.0 of the Live Readership Activity Map
We will soon be ready to release version 2.0 of the visualization that demonstrates the real-world impact of your scholarship. You can expect to see a more user-friendly design and the ability to zoom in on regions with reader activity. We got a lot of good feedback from many of you who have been testing the maps for the past few months and we’re looking forward to seeing the great things you’ll do with the new version.
Okay, so when do we get to see the new features?
We’re currently shooting for a late June release but will know more specific dates when we’ve finished with coding and moved on to the testing phase. Once the date and details are firmer, we will make sure to update the community. Stay tuned to the DC Telegraph for updates on the above features, news about other upcoming improvements, and a continued closer look at our development process.
For questions about upcoming or recently released features, feel free to contact our Consulting Services team at support@dc.bepress.com!