Collections

Collections are a quick way to collect and store images such as pages and annotations which are possible to find across the whole website. It is possible to create as many collections as you want, share them to others, create printable views, or send them to the Digital Lightbox.

A few things about Collections:

• They are stored in the browser's memory, which means
• you do not need an account to create them
• you will not see the collections on other PCs, browsers
• if you delete the cache, you also delete the collections
• It is possible to share collections with other people by copying its URL and sharing it. People can access to the collection by that URL
• Collections are private: no one can see your collections, because DigiPal does not keep any track of them. The only way to expose a collection is by sharing it
• Once shared, a URL to a collection is persistent. There is no way to "unshare" it.

Collections management page

This page lists all the collections created and let the user performs a few actions on one or many of them, such as Copy, Remove, Send to Lightbox, Share. More importantly, this page is where users can create new collections. By clicking on a collection, the user will be redirected to the collection's page.

Collection page

The collection's page contains all the items that the collection has, and let the user perform action on individual items or on the whole collection. By entering in the collection's page, an user also selects the current collection.

Adding items to collections

To add items to a collection, a “starring” methods has been introduced. Across all the website, every image can be added to the collection by starring it. To star an image, you will have to hover it, and a little star will appear on the right side of the image:

• if the image is already in the collection, the star will be yellow, and can only be _unstarred. _Moreover, a star will already be visible on the top-right side of the image.
• … otherwise, it will be white, and can only be starred

This system is consistent across the whole website, although in some places it is possible to star many selected images in once.

Creating a Collection

An important thing to notice is that when accessing for the first time to DigiPal, or when no collection has been created, there will always be a stored collection simply named “Collection”.To create a collection, just follow the link to your current collection in the main menu, which also displays the number of items contained in it.

Alternatively, you can just navigate to http://www.digipal.eu/digipal/collection.

Once in the page, you will find a second-level menu whose first item is labellled “New”. When clicked on, a window shall appear prompting you to enter a name for the new collection. If the name already exists, the collection will be created with an incremental number appended at end of the name.

If the new collection is successfully created, a notification should appear to confirm it. After that, you can go to the collection page by clicking on its image (a folder icon).

Which collection am I working with?

As already mentioned, the first collection you will be working with is “Collection”. You can change the current collection by just clicking on the collection you want with, and it will automatically replace the collection menu entry with the name of the collection you selected. At that point, all the items you will be adding, will be stored in the current collection.

Selecting collections

In order to work with multiple collections in the same time, it is possible to select them and perform actions for all the collections selected.To do that, you can either click the checkbox on the left of each collection, or clicking the label of a collection. Remember that clicking on the image of a collection will redirect the user to the collection page.

Deleting collections

There are two ways to delete existing collections:

• selecting them in the Collections page and clicking the button “Delete”
• clicking the button “Delete” in the collection page itself. The user will be then redirected to the Collections page.

Sharing collections

There are two ways to share existing collections:

• selecting them in the Collections page and clicking the button “Share”
• clicking the button “Share” in the collection page itself.

A new window will be opened and a short URL shown, along with a Twitter button to quickly tweet the URL.

By sharing the URL, other users have the possibility to store the collection and use it. Remember that:

• Collections are private until shared
• Collections are stored in the browser's memory. However, by sharing and saving the URL to a given collection, you will always able to recover it.

Copying collections

It is possible to copy/clone collections in the collections page by clicking the “Copy” button and selecting the collection to be copied. Similarly to when creating a new collection, the user will be prompted to enter a name for the collection, which will contain the same items as the one selected.

Sending collections to the Lightbox

There are two ways to send collections or individual images to the Lightbox:

• If the users is in the collections page, it is possible to select the collection wanted and click the “Lightbox” button. In this case, all the images will be sent to the Lightbox
• If the user is in the collection page instead, it is possible to individually select the images to be sent to the Lightbox. It is possible to select images by either clicking on an item, or by checking the checkbox on the left of each item.

To send the images, the user has to click the button “Send to Lightbox”, which is available only if at least one item is selected.

Removing items from a collection

The button “Remove” on the left side of the page, in a collection’s page, allows to remove the selected images. It is only available when at least one image is selected.

Renaming a collection

If the name chosen for a collection has to be changed, it is possible to do so by going into the collection’s page, and clicking on its name on the top of the page (just below the main menu).

A cursor will appear and it will then be possible to edit the name of the collection. It will be automatically saved as soon as the user clicks on any other thing in the page.

A notification will confirm that the name has been correctly changed.

Collection Views (Table/Print/Grid)

Any collection can be visualized in three different ways:

• Table view, selected by default, allows to see many details of each item, and to interact with them similarly to the way Google Drive does
• Grid view, does not display any detail about the individual items, every image is positioned after the other
• Print view, hides much of the content of the website to make the page printable (only the images and basic details will be displayed).

To switch between the Table and Grid views, you can click on the respective items on the right side of the page.

Sorting items

In all the views is possible to sort the items in various ways.

• In the Table View, it is possible to drag and drop any item to sort them manually. To sort them based on a given property, it is possible to click on the labels of the columns. If the user clicks, for instance, on “Allograph”, the whole collection will be sorted alphabetically according to the property “Allograph”. A second click will instead reverse the sorting.
• In the Grid view, a dropdown will be shown to the user. It has 4 options and only works for graphs annotations. The options are:
• No grouping (default)
• Allograph
• Hand
• Manuscript

Giancarlo Buomprisco