Welcome to our new site!

Posted: March 26, 2017 by Andrew Hankinson

After over a year of development, we are proud to launch the all-new DIAMM site. Some of the exciting new features include:

  • Online editing of content. DIAMM records can be edited online, making changes and updates to our records available immediately.
  • Source contribution acknowledgements. We have moved towards a collaborative model, where our users can suggest changes and updates to our source records. These suggestions will be reviewed by DIAMM staff and your contribution will be acknowledged under the "Contributions" section of that record.
  • Public and private commentary. All users can make publicly-visible comments on a source, alerting colleagues to additional information concerning that record. Private notes are also available, so that users can make 'notes-to-self' as they work through our catalogue.
  • Fast and comprehensive search interface. The new search interface is designed to allow users to explore our database through an intelligent keyword search and a variety of faceted filters.
  • Extensive linking and cross-referencing. All resources are designed to foster browsing and exploration. A person record, for example, will display that person's relationships to sources and compositions.
  • A new image viewer. The Diva.js image viewer is now our default viewer, providing a more fluid and responsive image viewing interface.

Additionally, we have made several changes 'under the hood':

  • SSL everywhere. All DIAMM resources are served over a secure connection.
  • API everywhere. Every record in the DIAMM database has a corresponding machine-readable representation. Read more about this.
  • More robust serving system. Our image servers have been improved, our search engine is fast, and we have lots of caches to help speed up the website.

Finally, we're still working on improving a few things:

  • We are still tweaking the styles. Font sizes, spacing, colours, &tc. are all going to be tweaked over the next few months.
  • Metadata fixes. The difference between the old and new databases is significant, and you may notice some irregularities in the metadata (duplicated or empty records) that could not be reliably fixed automatically. We're embarking on a metadata cleanup, so expect that these issues will be sorted out in the near future.
  • The extra resources (e.g., doctoral dissertations) are currently being rebuilt and so will come back gradually.