If you are reading this post, you have found our new site! Many thanks to the team at Grassroutes Networking and Neu Concepts for their many hours and late nights designing, building, and updating our site.
Feel like we had two sites? In effect, we did. The RRR functioned completely separate from the rest of our site previously. The main site was html code that we had to edit manually. The pages were all long static content and very little was done to make the user experience much more than a place to find “stuff”. With the new site we have re-organized the static content into a database driven WordPress content management system. Now, searching for items in the main site is much more user friendly without all the extra time hunt on the page.
Menus are the same no matter where you are. With the WordPress style sheets, each page within the site now looks the same as all the others. The navigation tools are consistent allowing you to get to the next item of interest without having to look around to find the link.
The Rubicon Research Repository (RRR) has been updated from version 1.3.2 of the DSpace software to version 1.7.2. Some of the features available as of this release include:
* Configurable New Item Submission System
* Improved Google Scholar metadata exposure
* PowerPoint text extraction, for searching within PowerPoint slides
* RSS Feed Integration
The server hosting our site has also moved. Our first web site was hosted externally but with the start of the RRR in 2006, the site has been located on a server at a board member’s home. Along with the complete re-design of our site goes migration back to an externally hosted solution. This adds some overhead not seen previously but adds the benefits of greater bandwidth, regular back-ups, continuously updated software, better data security, and less downtime when updates need to be made.
We are not done yet, there are many things that are still evolving within the site so please be patient as we grow.
