Scott Phillips on Manakin
Manakin is a new modular, customizable, user-friendly interface for DSpace. Each community and collection within DSpace has the ability to establish a unique look-and-feel, brand content, visualize metadata, and share newly implemented features with others. The DSpace Foundation recently spoke with the lead Manakin developer, Scott Phillips, who is the Research & Development Coordinator at the Texas Digital Library.
Why did you develop Manakin? ?With a growing trend towards online scholarly communications, digital repositories have become increasingly more important for the sharing and management of our knowledge. However, JSP, the existing DSpace user interface at the time, did not meet Texas A&M Libraries repository?s needs. Mainly, we did not have the adoption rate we wanted and some communities? needs were simply not being met. Modifying the JSP-based interface is not only expensive and time consuming, but it also limits repositories to one type of interface. Therefore, our goal of creating a more usable interface was born. Manakin was designed to adapt the user interface to suit many specific types of needs, users, and collections. Along with the other Manakin use cases, Texas A&M University Libraries drove the need for an improved user interface. These needs were specifically based on the collection requirements to show branded content, as well as an extended integration with the web. We are now able to integrate with the rest of Texas A&M?s web presence and other electronic information initiatives within the library.?
How did Manakin improve the repository at the Texas Digital Library? ?Since TDL is a consortium of academic libraries in the state of Texas, it was important to recognize the individual institutions and have the appropriate branding. This is so each institution would not feel like they have lost ownership of their content. With a customizable Manakin user interface, TDL does not appear to be taking credit for their material. Instead, the owner of the material has the appropriate credit. In addition to meeting the collection requirements to show branded content, Manakin offers the user the opportunity to change the look and feel of their specific repository. In this case, the repository may even be branded along the lines of the institution's structure: colleges, departments, centers, labs, etc. Manakin also offers developers several new tools that allow creation of modular extensions to the repository. This extension framework allows existing features to be modified cleanly, or entirely new features to be created. These features can range from new workflow and ingestion capabilities to minor modifications regarding the display of content."
How did the other Manakin pilot projects impact the final version of Manakin? ?Manakin was built with a constant awareness of several projects at TDL, Instituto Antonio Carlos Jobim and A&M Library's Geologic Atlas of the United States. Their development was serendipitous in that the needs of the repositories and Manakin affected the development of each other. In creating the final version of Manakin, we were able to consider the cases of these pilot projects to determine additional user needs and what we could improve."
How does Manakin relate to future innovations in DSpace 2.0? ?The goal of DSpace 2.0 is to take the diverse functions currently available and split them up so as to produce separate modules. This is so users will be able to make changes to each module individually without it having an effect on the other features. Manakin is a large piece of the modularity story at the interface level, and we plan to bring that flexibility to other parts of DSpace with 2.0.?
What is the timeframe for future development? ?The current phase is to integrate Manakin with DSpace 1.5. Downloads of 1.5 will include Manakin with an on/off switch so one can opt to use it or use the standard JSP user interface. A more long term goal is to allow the content curator ? a non-technical person ? to do some limited customization for things like color scheme, logo, metadata field definitions, etc., all through a web-based interface. This project is called Feathers and will be discussed further at the Open Repositories Conference 2008 in April.?
What does Manakin need from the DSpace user community? ?As DSpace moves closer to adopting Manakin as the default user interface, we expect to see a community formed around the tradition of sharing themes and aspects. As new features are modularly developed, they can be easily shared, thus improving the user experience for everyone by allowing repositories to incorporate the latest developments from around the world. We need users to realize that the ability for further customization requires sharing. Making user interface customizations available to the community can serve as use cases for other similar repositories. If institutions come up with new aspects, themes or workflows, they should share them with the community so others can use them. ?
Where did the name ?Manakin? come from? ?We saw a nature video on the Manakin, which is a South American songbird that does a moonwalk dance. We greatly enjoyed the video and thought it sounded like a great name for our project.? To see a Manakin in action, click on image to left.
Several repositories outside of Texas have also adopted Manakin to address various challenges. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is using Manakin for their internal image collection: Rotch Visual Collections Online. In Europe, the Doria repository is using Manakin for the dissemination of electronic thesis and dissertations from Finnish universities and has adapted Manakin to the multi-lingual needs of its users.
To view a demo, tutorial or to download Manakin, please click here.
Learn more about Manakin:
Scott Phillips, Cody Green, Alexey Maslov, Adam Mikeal, and John Leggett. "Manakin: A New Face for DSpace". D-Lib Magazine, Volume 13 Number 11/12 ISSN 1082-9873, November/December 2007.
Scott Phillips, Cody Green, Alexey Maslov, Adam Mikeal, and John Leggett. "Introducing Manakin: Overview and Architecture". Open Repositories, San Antonio, Texas, January 23 - 26, 2007.