Recent Feature Highlights for Hyku Commons

(Contribution by Nicholas Stanton-Roark.)

The past couple of months have been a whirlwind of development. In December the upgrade from 2.1 to 4.1.0 was finalized and the attendant bugs addressed; in the same month we finished a mini-sprint of enhancements mostly related to long-standing bugs; and in January we finalized a request order for metadata enhancements based on community feedback. 

In this post, we want to highlight some of the features that have undergone significant improvement in the past couple few months.

Featured collections

For some time, the collections that appear on each repository homepage have been beyond anyone’s control. Frequently, editing a collection would cycle it off the homepage—but not always. There was no reliable way to control which collections would appear on the homepage except to limit the repository to only a few collections. 

This has been addressed by replacing the random collection placement with a Featured Collection panel on the homepage. Collections can be toggled to be featured/unfeatured from the collection view page, just as works can for the Featured Works panel. Once featured, collections can be reordered on the homepage by any admin user.

Screenshot of box with tab that says Explore Collections with "no collections have been featured" underneath and a "view all collections" button underneath that.

A featured collections panel with no collections featured

Collection-level search

Previously, the search bar built into the collection page only searched the titles of works and required an exact string match even then. We have addressed this by building a full solr database search into this field. This means that searches from that central search bar work as a typical user would expect: it searches all fields and contents (including OCRed text) of works and subcollections within the collection. 

Batch edit

For some time, the batch edit function on the Works dashboard has been bugged, returning an error message when attempted. We have repaired this functionality, and multiple works can be edited by selecting them from the dashboard and clicking the Edit Selected button. From this screen, information shared by the selected works will appear in the relevant fields, and new data can be supplied to fields and will update all selected works simultaneously.

Example of batch edit screen

Batch editing works with a common license

Homepage appearance

The Hyku Commons homepage has had a renovation, greatly improving the look and feel as well as the clarity of the shared repository space. Whereas the previous, placeholder homepage was very static, this presentation dynamically displays a variety of directory images as they are toggled from unlisted to public.

Tenant icons

Hyku Commons homepage as of 2/7/2023

Favicon

favicon definition
Favicon definition from dictionary.com

By navigating to Settings → Appearance → Favicon, users can set a custom favicon image for their tenant. If you often have 30-50 tabs open at any time, we expect you will find this helpful going forward. 

Analytics

New analytics visualizations and information have been added to various dashboards. In particular, a new Analytics section contains a Works report and Collections report, with some configuration and export options.

Collections report screenshot

A collections overview report

Cross-tenant searching

With the upgrade came the capacity for us to support cross-tenant searching. This will include a Hyku Commons wide search (of public tenants, not unlisted ones), with a search bar to be added to the Hyku Commons homepage, but will also permit more custom shared searches.


This is only a cross-section of the work that has been done in recent months, but these are some broad changes we want to make sure stakeholders don’t miss. See our patch notes document for more granular information about enhancements and bug fixes. We’re looking forward to bringing metadata improvements shortly!

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