TAPAS Beta Testing Under Way

We are now in our second week of beta testing the TAPAS user interface, with 27 individuals from 25 institutions and 8 countries currently participating. This testing exercise is focusing on the basic features of the site, including:

• reading and browsing projects, collections, and documents
• creating user account and projects
• creating collections and upload TEI files
• basic configuration of TAPAS publications
• reporting bugs and making feature requests

To facilitate the testing, we’ve set up a discussion list for beta-testers with separate discussion threads for each testing activity. At the end of the testing period, we’ll ask participants to complete a short anonymous survey to help us focus on the areas most in need of further development. All of this feedback will be reviewed at our upcoming meeting at the University of Virginia in May. Unsurprisingly, testers have already reported several areas that need work, in particular the searching and results display. Because of the diversity of objects available for searching—TAPAS projects and their metadata, TAPAS collections and their metadata, and individual TEI texts—we need to put further thought into how to distinguish these meaningfully and how to organize the results a user receives. No doubt the next few days of testing will reveal further areas that need work!