We met today (meeting minutes to follow) to refine our concept and discuss our research so far.
There is an initial problem that we are currently working through regarding the brief requirement of using the Trove API. During our research we discovered that the trove API does not provide access to the websites listed on the trove website. We can however, use the Wayback Time-machine API (that Trove refers to) to get this information.
A closer read of what the Trove API can and can't access says:
"Search Trove newspaper articles, lists and works. (Works are made up of “versions”. They can be books, images, maps, music, sound, video, archives, journal articles…) Archived websites, people and organisations have not been included at this point."
We also looked at the search function of the API, and the 'search all' does not include archived websites:
"Search across the records in Trove. The same records you search from the Trove homepage, excluding archived websites, people and organisations."
We are in the process of discussing solutions with our tutors and course coordinator and have contact Trove to see if there is any support or workarounds for accessing archived websites.
Our current suggested fix is to organise the websites accessed via categories (e.g. sport, arts, education, government...) and to illustrate the categories (background, button?) with trove images (related to the category but not the actual websites) which are pulled using the trove API.
We would still need to use the Wayback Time-machine API to get the website details to validate but at least we are not by passing Trove altogether.
One of the risks we discussed today was having to make design decisions based solely on checking off a box in the brief and not on what would make the best product that suits our user needs. While for the most part these two considerations are not opposites and inform decisions in consort, we are hoping that this problem is not the case of the former.
The core part of the brief that we are answering is to:
"highlight, reveal, [or] focus the content available through Trove ... something that goes beyond the simple search paradigm that they currently have and that sheds light on rarely visited corners of Trove."
We believe our concept definitely does that. Stay tuned for more concept updates.
UPDATE: The course coordinator emailed back straight away with an OK to go ahead with our proposed suggestions. We also chatted more with our tutor at the workshop and with the course coordinator after Friday's lecture.
(Originally posted on our team blog: Restoring the web)
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