Document Sets - FromThePage Blog

The new Document Sets feature was proposed and funded by Adam Rabinowitz and the University of Texas-Austin Classics Department to support the presentation of sub-sets of works within a collection to different audiences.

One use case might be the presentation of an "exhibit" of an author's papers relating to a theme -- personal correspondence vs. professional correspondece, or political topics vs. business negotiations with an editor. Imagine Davidson's Complete Works of George Orwell divided into sets of "Wartime Broadcasts for the BBC", "Negotiations with Publishers", "Book and Pop-Culture Reviews", "Writing about WW2", "Papers relating to Animal Farm", and "Papers relating to 1984". In such a case, works would be selected from the collection on thematic lines, but many works would appear in two or more thematic sets.

Another use case--one particularly suggested by Adam's classroom use with the Terrell Papers--is that of a collection of only partially transcribed works, edited by students in a classroom. In that case, the works might be hidden from the public until they had been reviewed for quality (by the general editor or the classroom instructor, depending on project), and only then exposed to researchers outside the transcription project. In addition, a sub-set of an exhaustively digitized collection might be chosen to be the focus of a transcription/translation effort, adding works from a private collection to a private document set created to direct the efforts of a particular classroom or team.

To support document sets, with their dual roles controlling access and presentation, I've built a set of features accessible to collection owners. To enable document sets, go to your collection, choose "settings' and hit the "Enable Document Sets" button. This will add a new "Sets" tab to your collection screen to manage its document sets.

Creation, editing, and assigning works to document sets will be, I hope, entirely straightforward. Nevertheless, I'm concerned about the possibility that documents may be made public accidentally. I've added indicator text about the default state of works and the public status of document sets, which I hope will prevent private material being made public. If you have any suggestions for making this clearer or easier to use, please let me know.

Document Sets are now presented as if they were collections -- stand-alone items containing descriptions, home-pages, and listings of works

There are 4 ways to add a document to a document set:

1) The "sets" tab in a collection lists all the works in the collection and which document set they belong to, with a checkbox for adding works to one or more document sets.

2) When you add a work to FromThePage, you can choose which collection it belongs to OR you can choose a document set. If you choose a document set, the work gets added to both the document set and the collection the document set is associated with.

3) The document set settings tab lists all the works in the associated collection and you can use a checkbox to include them there.

4) When you upload a zip file for a document, you can include a "metadata.yml" file in the folder for the document. That "metadata.yml" file has fields for a lot of settings for the work. One of those fields is "document set". You can list one or more document sets in that field and the document will be added to the document sets you name. If the document set doesn't exist, we'll create it (and make it private). (You don't need all the fields in the example. It could be only the document set field.)

This is the most complicated solution, but may also be the easiest way to add a document to multiple document sets at at one time.