Bonolo

While developing the Bonolo end-user interface, there were suggestions and improvements that were received, but were out of scope for the project. Instead, they could be implemented in future research projects.

Continuous Improvements

User and performance testing revealed that there are numerous improvements that can be made to the Bonolo Web application. This could lead to a more user-friendly and intuitive way to navigate the digital collections and to improve the experience of interacting with the data. Improvements could also be made to the current annotations system. This could help to streamline the commenting system so that the amount of time required to post a comment is decreased. Also, the comments could be displayed in a more intuitive manner, possibly adding in other social media tools, e.g., “liking” a post or story.

The page numbering system on the search page could be improved so that it does not negatively affect the page load times as was evident in the final performance evaluation.

Exporting Images

Due to time constraints, the user was only able to download story and book images in a compressed zip folder. Future work involves allowing the images to be exported in different file formats, e.g., PDFs, compressed tarballs or Microsoft Word documents.

Account Settings

The scope of the project did not include an account management system. The user could only register an account and could not customise it further. Associated with this could be the ability for users to bookmark collections that they are viewing; customising their nickname; resetting their password; adding information about themselves; uploading an avatar; and disabling email notifications.

Viewing Other Digital Objects

Currently, the Web application can only display image files to the end-user. However, for this solution to be more dynamic and general, support for other digital media could be included. These digital media could include: sound files; video files; and other digital documents, such as PDFs.

System Configurability

Due to time constraints, the configurability of the system was not made very user friendly. In the future, the configurability of the Web application could be transposed to a Web page that an administrator has access to. This Web page would allow the administrator to index the digital collections and adjust the layout of the information displayed to the user. In addition, the administrators should be able to configure the number of search indices to make accessible to the end-user (currently, there are two: books and stories). This future work would allow the administrators to update the Web pages remotely, as opposed to having to be on the server.

Interoperability

Interoperability is the ability for one application to interact with another application by sharing and exchanging information. Future work could allow for users to subscribe to RSS feeds that inform them about recent activity on a collection they are monitoring. Otherwise, they could have the option to share the information they are viewing on Facebook, Twitter or other social networking sites.

Additional Testing

Additional user evaluations could have been done with the Web application being hosted on the Internet. This would allow for more realistic data response times to be recorded and would make some of the evaluation questions more relevant.

The performance testing conducted on the Bonolo end-user interface could be more rigorous. Other performance evaluations – such as altering the file structure – could be conducted so as to further investigate the scalability and robustness of the end-user interface. Also, more tests should be conducted so that more data can be captured. This will help to derive more accurate estimations and relationships from the results.