If ever there was a compelling argument for careful collections management, location tracking, valuation, etc., the loss of a million dollar artwork should suffice (see the New York Times article if you have not already). This is an embarrassing, and costly mistake…
Monthly Archives: February 2012
Mapping User Interface to Web Services – Observations from A2
Here are some observations after completing A2:
1. Sorting and formatting results from GET and POST calls to the collection space web service is very necessary and important to understanding what you’re working with. It is hard to read the results, and it takes time to find what you’re looking for in the document.
2. There are a lot of fields in the user interface. It takes some decision making (subjective) and ideally shared conventions to decide what things should go in which fields. This could be hard to standardize between institutions. And, it would seem that the number of collectively agreed upon fields (i.e. standards) would be rather small, although that could still be very useful (ie. logistics, loans, and insurance).
3. In the rare case that you’re someone who has to work both on the web services and user interface side, or work with people doing this work, it would be useful to have a mapping between the organization of the UI and web services (XML, JSON) results. In the ideal case there could be a anchor link between the respective locations in the two documents.