Case Study: Documenting Activities Edgerton Student Clubs & Teams
By Jim Bales (bales@mit.edu) and Steve Banzaert (sgtist@mit.edu) 2. What are you using thalia for (teaching, publication, photo purchasing, personal photo storage, etc)?
The Edgerton Center supports approximately 20-25 student clubs & teams that are engaged in hands-on projects (e.g., building and racing solar-powered vehicles). Most of the teams take part into competitions (often International).
We want to collect images from the teams, with supporting information. The goal is to be able to rapidly locate and download images to appear:
- On the team's web page & on the Edgerton web page
- In communications with current sponsors of the team showing how the support is being used
- In communications soliciting support from other donors to the team
- In reports from the Edgerton Center to DUE, the Provost, and the President. 1. Who are the users (faculty, or staff, or students)? What are their roles in Thalia (domain admin or regular users)?
The staff member overseeing clubs & teams (Steve Banzaert - a domain admin) will require each team to submit a number of images showing what the team has been doing. This will be required after every major event the team takes part in, and once a year as part of their annual reporting. These may break into natural subsets (e.g., for solar car team; Designing the Car, Building the Car, Testing the Car, Racing the Car). The teams would need to provide some documentation of who/what/when/where for each image (the descriptions are likely in a Word/text/.pdf file. Short video clips may be included as well. Option 1:
At least one student from each team is a user. This person uploads the images (and/or videos and/or descriptions) and tags them appropriately. Option 2:
Each team sends the images, video, and documentation to Steve, he then uploads all to Thalia and adds requisite Metadata. 3. Do your users interact with each other or collaborate in any way? If so, please describe the workflow.
The workflow is not clear at this time. We anticipate, e.g., the Director of the Center needs to create a presentation to give to incoming student about their options to take part in hands-on engineering activities. The Director creates a collection of images, drawing from each teams library, using the metadata (and any description files uploaded into the Library) to decide what to include & why. Alternatively, the Director simply downloads the images of interest and includes them in his PowerPoint presentation.
One possible workflow is:
1) Student users from many teams upload images w/ metadata (either into their "team" album, or into the Edgerton album with a team-specific tag) -- the ability to apply metadata with a broad brush is probably critical to get this to actually happen (eg, label 50 photos with "Australia, Competition, 2008").
2) Individual photos are either culled or rated by students and/or Edgerton staff.
3) When report time comes for anyone (the Director, the students, the staff), that person finds useful images by simply searching for, e.g., "2008 & competition & good_photo".
Steve notes: I'm sure there are other ways of using the system; this one seems to solve the biggest problems for us -- storing the images in some common area and applying some basic metadata to help sort through the image overload that will immediately happen.