Dear future Digital Platform Manager:

What a ride the summer has been! A great foundation for the Scalar book has been established! The site is now ready for new collections to be added as more metadata comes in!

To manage the collections, make sure you know which pages to use the “structured media gallery” layout for and which to use “media gallery.” Structured media gallery is meant for broader keywords (e.g. Black Publications) while the media gallery is meant for the more narrow collections (e.g. Rapped in Black).

Making sure that items are tagged with all of their keywords is important too. It can be done by navigating to the media page of an item, and choosing to have the media pages be tagged by the pages corresponding to the keywords.

To make items show up on the “collections” page, have the broader keywords tag the media items of the narrow keywords. This will make more specific items show up under the broad keyword, but clicking on the item will reveal that the item is also part of a more specific collection. The structured media gallery can only go up to two levels deep, so the connection to the items is shortened this way. To visualize it, imagine a graph with the “collections” page as the start and the media item as the endpoint. Always ensure that there are not more than two arrows between the start and end.

You will also have to create thumbnails for each item for it to show up properly in the structured media gallery. This can be done by navigating to “styling” on the media page followed by “thumbnail.” This is accessed by clicking on the pencil icon on the media page. For images, you can choose the image to be the thumbnail.

For PDFs, this process is a little more complicated. Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat. Click the arrow on the left side of the screen followed by the icon that looks like two pieces of paper stacked together. Right click on the first page and click extract pages. Make sure the pages are “1 to 1” in the dialog. Click “OK.” Click “Export PDF” on the right side of the screen. Select “Image” followed by “PNG.” Click export. Select the first folder that is highlighted. Name the file “AAP_####_thumbnail.png.” Upload this image to the site and make it the media item’s thumbnail.

That’s most of the technical stuff I can think of. Consult the digital item creation workflow for more information.

Good luck! I hope you’re just as passionate about supporting this project as I am!

Sincerely,
Deja Jackson.