During the 2008 NINES Summer Workshop we put Collex to the test – a usability test. As we plan for the redesign and official release of Collex in December 2008, the NINES tech team decided it was time to get some honest feedback from users unfamiliar with Collex. Thanks to Dr. Laura Mandell, Associate Director of NINES and organizatrix extraordinaire, we were allowed access to the eye-tracking software in the Usability Lab at Miami University, Ohio. We had 5 participants complete three tasks – search, collect and create an exhibit (Illustrated Essay). The results were painfully informative, and we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. But that feedback will go into making a more powerful – and more intuitive – Collex.

Task: Use Collex to find objects associated with John Keats

This image shows the activity of the user’s eyes when looking at the homepage. Green indicates a quick glance, while red areas show the places where the user’s gaze rested for longer durations.

As you can see, it’s tough to get to Collex from nines.org: the shortcut is obscured by all the text on the page, and people are more inclined to use the main navigation bar. Notice how this user looked directly at the “Try Collex Now” link, and still did not notice it.

The NINES redesign will improve this by providing a search blank on the homepage, immediately communicating the function and purpose of the site and encouraging its use.

This image shows the user’s eye movements while collecting objects from the search results. The “x” marks indicate where the person clicked the mouse button while completing the activity. Although every single user tested had trouble finding the log-in area, the action of collecting went smoothly overall.

The shift to the Exhibit Builder proved difficult, however, mostly due to problems with Collex and Internet Explorer. No one was able to finish an essay during the study, unfortunately, because browser incompatibilty.

Here’s a final screenshot of a user reading the Exhibit Builder page:

In the redesigned Collex, the Exhibit Builder menus will be more prominently displayed. Text will also be rendered much larger, to make skimming easier and more productive.

Many thanks to Miami University for making this study possible!

A quick (and tardy) note here to say that an article I wrote last year, describing the NINES instance of Collex, has been published: “A Scholar’s Guide to Research, Collaboration, and Publication in NINES”. I had a little fun with self-reflexivity when writing it — knowing that it would appear in NINES — and it’s also notable because it’s part of the first issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net — a shift in that seminal electronic journal’s focus brought about in no small part because of the work of NINES.

But, mainly, it’s the Collex “missing manual.”

***UPDATE***   The NINES source code repository has moved. It can now be found at

svn://nines.performantsoftware.com/collex/trunk/web

***UPDATE***

ARP is pleased to announce that Collex, the social software and knowledge discovery tool powering the NINES federation of scholarly resources, is officially open source! We’ve been sharing and collaborating on a small scale with other programmers for some time, but have now made our Collex codebase available for anonymous download at:

https://subversion.lib.virginia.edu/repos/patacriticism/collex/trunk/

To communicate with other Collex developers, please subscribe to our email list, here:

https://list.mail.virginia.edu/mailman/listinfo/collex-dev

You can see Collex installed and in action in the Mellon-funded NINES project, a federation of some 184,000 digital objects from 40 contributing sources: projects, libraries, journals, and publishers of 19th-century literary and cultural material. Collex also powers Finding the Celtic a newly-founded collaboratory for Celtic Studies, funded by the NEH.

Collex source code is shared under the Apache Software License 2.0.

Project Blacklight, the Collex spin-off Solr/Rails-based library catalog system we’ve mentioned around here before, is now officially open source and available, with a dayglow website, no less! It’s mostly a labor of love for the developers involved, so there’s not much yet in the way of documentation, but there is a mailing list and you can also watch work in progress at the UVA Library here.

Erik Hatcher recently presented as part of a “Digital Future and You” series at the Library of Congress. A webcast of Solr Powered Libraries: Using Blacklight and Collex at the University of Virginia” is now available on the LC website.

If you’re in the Charlottesville area this week and are interested in a first-hand look at Collex, please join us at the New Horizons in Teaching and Research conference, jointly sponsored by ITC and the University of Virginia Library. I’ll be offering two brief sessions on Collex (at 9:30 AM on May 22nd and at 11 o’clock on the 23rd) and will also speak more generally on NINES as a scholar-driven response to the crisis in humanities publishing at 2:45 on Tuesday the 22nd. For more details, see the conference program.