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Re: [EP-tech] Division/Subject/Department Info

Certainly subject areas using a long established index like Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal are much easier to maintain than divisions that based on experience are lucky to last 8-10 years.  However, the benefit of them is really to collate things into groups, so a faculty, school, department, unit, etc. can link to their publications.  A common example is departments and faculties having a latest publications widget on their homepage.  The hierarchical structure is also useful to the inputting user who knows how the institution is organised and therefore can quickly navigate to what they want rather than having to scroll through a long list.  However, as already discussed, it is rarely useful to an external user trying to find something in the divisions browse view, when an institution appears to organise themselves in rather illogical fashion.

On 27/02/2020 09:25, Christöpher Gutteridge via Eprints-tech wrote:

Yeah, collections of schools & departments such as the "faculties" we have, are shorter lived (8-10 years) and do not aid navigation, they only matter for members of the organisation. Most users of the public site are looking for subjects if they are browsing that route.


On 24/02/2020 15:30, James Kerwin wrote:
Hi Yuri and Chris,

Apologies for taking such a long time to reply, but I wanted to make sure I thanked you both.

Thank you; you've both given me plenty to think about and some small comfort in knowing I'm not alone with this tricky stuff. At the moment we're going through (another) restructuring event, but it looks as though it might be delayed so I may take my hands off the wheel with the Divisions (again) for a little while.

I noticed on one of the newer versions of EPrints there are "word clouds" which I think might be more useful for some users. Divisions are helpful if you know the university structure, but at Liverpool I wouldn't have immediately known the Philosophy Department was part of the School of Arts. For the sake of finding things I wonder if Divisions are really very meaningful anyway! For the purpose of reporting it's a different story, but I would expect Elements to provide that sort of functionality.

Thanks,
James

On Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 11:29 AM Yuri via Eprints-tech <eprints-tech@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
In general, in Eprints, we should rely on ontologies (instead of
semi-static classifications) for describing organizations. This is a
very good example:

https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/solution/core-public-organisation-vocabulary/distribution/core-public-organisation-vocabulary-version-100-pdf

What you do, then, is to implement the ontology on the university server
(using iQvoc for example) and use it. Next time, when the org changes,
someone will decide if a split/merge/close occours and what to do. You
can also have events in ontologies, so you can be notified on changes
and keep track of what happen in the organization structure.

Il 23/01/20 11:58, James Kerwin via Eprints-tech ha scritto:
>
> Would you seek to preserve the old structure on items that were
> deposited during that time? Or would you want them to update to the
> new structure? Likewise if a member of staff moves from one department
> to another e.g. Department of Biochemistry to the Department of
> Chemistry. I'm aware Divisional info in Elements is attached to the
> user rather than the record.
>
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Christopher Gutteridge <totl@soton.ac.uk> 
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