The Rochester Institute of Technology recently held 3 "Hands-On" Sessions with our Faculty to introduce them to the AMICO testbed project.

Two of the three sessions were videotaped and are being transcribed.

The transcriptions will be posted and available for viewing on the RIT's, AMICO site upon their completion.

FEEDBACK

First let me say that many of those who attended the sessions are very excited about what the collection already has to offer, and what it will be able to offer in the future. Although some of this feedback may come off as negative, there are many positive things going on and being said about the collection and its potential.

Feedback about the Images:

* Some images are not oriented properly

* Some images not cropped, making the image in the thumbnail very small and inconsistent with other images found during a search (still including color bars etc...)

Feedback about Navigation

* Inconsistency with information: artist name/spelling (For example a search under creator 'Dine, Jim' retrieves 3 images, a search under keyword 'Dine, Jim' retrieves 5 images due to two entries made as Jim, Dine) Using keyword catches some of these.

* Encourage possibly providing a sample with various names found because of the various inputting methods for the user to identify with or using the Union List of Artists Names (ULAN)

http://www.ahip.getty.edu/ulan_browser/

Feedback about Notebook

* Would like to be able to save a notebook at anytime including a thumbnail of the image and metadata about the it, (currently you can save the notebook as a text file, but the thumbnails are not contained in this file) as well as be able to open that notebook again in a Web Browser and get back to the original files for downloading of higher resolution images and more complete metadata

Feedback about Downloading

* When downloading an image the file name generated is not useful to the user if they are downloading more than one image in a session.

* When downloading it would be helpful for the user to have some of the image information present to them when the dialog box to save the file appears on the screen. The user could then change the name of the file to something meaningful to him/her (artist name, or title of the image), This would be helpful when downloading the text about the images as well. Currently when you click from the larger image file you are given downloading options but information about that image does not appear on the sub screen

* Would like to have the option of being able to download the image and together as one, eliminating the need to download image and text information separately to re-combine later for a presentation. AMICO requires that certain information be present every time an image is displayed publicly (see Section 7.3 of the AMICO Library University Agreement.) This required information should be combined with an image for a fourth download option.

Let us know what you think of these feedback comments.