Coventry Digital User Engagement Survey

Hello everyone, I received an email today from Dr Ben Kyneswood from Creative Cultures at Coventry University asking me to complete a survey about how I use Coventry Digital. I completed it in about 5 minutes making a few suggestions. Has anyone else had this/responded?

Yes. I think it's connected to demonstrating that Coventry Digital is a valuable resource and getting ideas on how it could be improved.

I, also was asked to take part even though I don't use it a lot. I'm going to take a closer look.

I have yet to respond but I think it is important that many of us do. I suspect universities will come under increasing financial pressure and will need evidence to show what they are doing is useful.

Yes, Coventry Digital's viability is being constantly questioned, so Ben is under some pressure to justify its existence and encourage more people to make use of it. I responded to the survey mostly positively, but I did criticise its search system, which is overly complex - and the display of searched results, which is on a "never-ending" page that eventually grinds to a halt if there are many pictures. That method also means it's impossible to bookmark your preferred element of a search result and find the same thing again, whereas I prefer an "X amount of images per page" method, which is much speedier, and you can bookmark the page that contains the images you actually require. The Coventry Digital software is, I believe, out of Ben's hands though, so I won't be holding my breath for an improvement any time soon.

Yes, I too have problems with the search and fear that the fundamental software design is part of the problem. The galleries help but there can't be an infinite number of those. I think that there are some logical galleries that could help. For me they would be date related. The modern stuff could be accurately dated but older photos could have an era eg pre war, war - 1969, 1970-2000. Or decades, if a lot more post war stuff comes in. At the moment the date filter just puts things in order they were uploaded or edited. If very large groups can be filtered down to something smaller, then they can be searched or just scrolled through. You'd at least remember which gallery you could find a specific picture in. I forgot to mention it in the survey but an open search option would help eg * or a blank field are sometimes used to select all. That would be useful when you you just want to search for all newly added images. The bigger the collection gets, the more thought needs to go into searches and it's easier if that was done now, rather than later. A keywords crib sheet would help, not just for searchers but for labelling the pictures. eg the words dig, excavation, archaeology and archaeological bring up different pictures.

Like Rob says I'd encourage all members to take part and use CD. Ben really needs to justify the funding he gets to make this accessible so search away (and we'll try to get that search function amended!)