With 2020 finally behind us, we reflect on all the changes and new features we've launched over the past year at FromThePage.
We were always on the lookout for new ways to improve the platform and listened to the feedback you gave to help provide the best experience possible for our project owners and volunteers.
As we thrust forward into 2021, we want to share with you some of our major updates to make sure you’re taking full advantage of everything FromThePage has to offer.
Onward!
- We internationalized the software interface & translated it into Spanish and Portuguese. This will let us add additional interface languages relatively easily -- we'd love to work with you on one!
- If you import a PDF with a text layer, we can import that text for correction. You can also import OCR text along with their images in the zip file import.
- You asked for better workflows for review, and we responded with features to restrict completed works, log review tasks, and to make it easier to add works to document sets. You can move works from a public document set to a private one for review.
- We've done a lot of work on our exports, including export to CONTENTdm, bulk exports, improved TEI exports and a lot of enhancements to our IIIF API.
- Folks with large organization plans can contact us to make their Single Sign On available for FromThePage login.
- To make it easier for transcribers to find individual works and learn about the context for those works, you can now upload metadata for documents via spreadsheets, and project owners can configure projects to use metadata for browsing and filtering.
- You can upload a spreadsheet of subjects to use for linking references in the transcribed text.
- We developed an advanced editor to support HTML and TEI tagging of documents. (If you’d like to volunteer to beta test this, let us know!)
- Inclusive language both within the FromThePage code ("allow list" rather than "white list" and in the user interface ("project by" instead of "owned by"). Users can add a "Real Name" to use when crediting their work. This is exposed in exports if it is filled out, otherwise pseudonymous usernames are exposed.
- Invisible to you, but very important for the sustainability of FromThePage, is the upgrade to Rails 6. This means the framework and libraries FromThePage are secure and supported. We've also done a lot of work on performance, but there's still a lot to do.
We're thankful for our development partners this year, including National Endowment for the Humanities and University of Texas-Austin Libraries, National Historic Records and Publications Commission, the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition, the Church History Library (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), the Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, University of Innsbruck, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Frederick Douglass Papers.
... and to our developers and open source contributors: Diego Viola, Josie Brumfield, Isabela Barton, Jacob Creedon, Ben Companjen
... and to our translators: Joshua Ortiz Baco, Bryce McLin, and Alberto Palacios
... and all our beta testers.
THANK YOU to everyone.
We appreciate you all.
- Ben & Sara
You can read the details on any of these features on our releases page or schedule a call with us for a discussion of how to use them.