Not using the PUI? Not using OAI, or Docs? If so, consider turning these services off in your configuration file. (e.g. AppConfig[:enable_docs] = false)
You are going to use the new PUI? Here are some things to consider before you launch this service:
- Sit down with your public services staff and explore all of the new features together. Talk about what adjustments your site will want to make to the application before going live.
- Review the use of the "publish" checkbox in your staff site!!! Seriously, review this a few times, and consider adjusting any staff-side workflows if need be.
- In the new public interface, any agent record that is "published" will show up. Previously, these records also had to be linked to a material description record (resource, accession, digital object, or a component-level record) to show up in the public interface. Now, having them published will suffice.
- If you have the "publish" checkbox turned on by default in the staff interface, any time you add a new record or note that's published, that record will be indexed and added to your public interface in a matter of minutes. That said, if the new addition is a child of an unpublished ancestor, it still won't show up in the public interface until its parent or ancestor is also published.
- Do you import EAD records into your system?
- If want these to be unpublished by default, and not added to your public interface shortly after they're imported, make sure to update your EAD so that the archdesc element will have an audience attribute set to internal.
- Right now, any agent headings that are added during the EAD import process are unpublished regardless of what's in your EAD finding aid. Please note that you'll also need to publish any agents that are added via an EAD import before they will show up in the public interface.
- Do you want to suppress any of the seven links that are included in the primary navigation bar of the site?
- Do you have more than one repository? If not, consider removing the repositories option from your primary navigation row of links (e.g. AppConfig[:pui_hide][:repositories] = true)
- Do you have any digital object records ready to go? If not, suppress that link.
- Same for classification records, which are labelled "Record Groups" in the new public interface by default.
- If you're not going to configure the Request action button to work with an email client, or replace it with another plugin, like the Aeon plugin, then you should turn off this action button before going live. (e.g. AppConfig[:pui_page_actions_request] = false)
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- Want your site indexed by search engines? Of course you do! Once you're done testing your local configurations, be sure to update your robots.txt file so that the site can be crawled (and consider blocking craws on "/search?" pages and anything else you don't want to show up as a search result).
- Consider adding something so that you can track and evaluate online use of your new public interface. For instance, you could add PiWik or Google Analytics to your site. With either of those options, you might also want to use their "tag manager" feature to do more in-depth analysis, like tracking how often the accordions are used, the new action buttons, and possibly even to group finding aid page views together (i.e. so that you can combine the archival object page views with their respect parent-level resource record page views).
After you've launched, let the ArchivesSpace community know what works well in the interface and what doesn't. The public interface should evolve over time based on feedback from the community and your researchers. And please share any tips, tricks, or custom plugins that you decide to use with the community. Here's an example: https://github.com/hudmol/aspace_yale_pui