We’re excited to let you know that pagination, one of your most requested features, will be coming soon to your Digital Commons repository. With the next release of Digital Commons at the end of February, pagination will become a standard display feature on all individual repositories. Why is this development such an important step forward?
Leveraging the discoverability of Digital Commons for special and curated collections is a developing trend in our community. We saw a 120% increase in image galleries in 2013, as well as numerous collections of oral histories, folk music, archival manuscripts, and other primary sources being displayed in book galleries and basic series. Unlike collections that feature articles of independent research, these new collections feature records that build on one another, and require a specific order of presentation to create a narrative for visitors. From archivists to special collections coordinators, we’ve heard your call for rich pagination features to optimize the natural browsing of curated exhibits and historic collections, and we’re excited to answer it with this latest release.
In addition to the expansion of special and curated collections, your collections as a whole are also mushrooming—some image and ETD collections have tens of thousands of records—making pagination an important navigational tool, regardless of the collection type. Similarly, on the horizon we see large datasets, which often contain many files that must also display in a predetermined sequence. Introducing pagination now will play an important role in preparing your repositories for success with datasets later.
After much research and testing of different options, we’re pleased to release the solution we found works best for the widest possible range of collections in our community. The new pagination features will include:
Adjacent range: visitors will see prompts to help them navigate forward and backward, either one page or many pages at a time.
Endpoints: visitors will be able to skip to the first or last page of a collection, and see the total number of pages at a glance.
The new pagination feature will be available to all series, ETD series, book galleries, and image galleries, when they update after February 27, 2014. Stay tuned for updates about changes to our journal launching capabilities and other new features in the coming months!
What would help you be more innovative with the presentation of your digital collections? Contact your consultant at support@dc.bepress.com with questions or feedback.
