UBC BG and CPR's Web Sites

I'm demonstrating some of the techniques and tools that we use on the BGCPR sites to attendees of the Museums and the Web 2005 conference being held in Vancouver. I thought I'd make an annotated list of what I'll be demonstrating as a handy guide for the conference attendees to come back to and visit at their leisure. If you're not attending the conference, you might find some items of interest as well, but please note that I'm going to be technical with sometimes little or no explanation for brevity's sake.

Perhaps the most successful feature of the garden site is the UBC Botanical Garden Forums. As Namir Anani, Director General of the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), stated in his plenary address, e-forums and cyberchat are the future of web-based engagement tools that museums will use for conversation, community curation and collaboration. We've been hosting our forums since mid-2002 (and really started to promote them in early 2003), and I find myself agreeing with Anani's vision.

For some statistics about the forums, I invite you to read this thread on recognition for non-UBC contributors. Or, visit the forums and browse.

Two uses of the forums that you cannot see as a casual user are the garden's use of the software as an internal knowledge management and workflow tool and one lecturer's use of the software for helping teach classes. Some of the staff and researcher-only forums include “Information for New Employees”, “Meeting Minutes” and “Plant Needs and Requests”. A proxy user account is set up that has the email address of our internal email listserv. Email updates are then sent out once a day for important forums or once a week for lower priority forums summarizing the new items. Staff can review thread titles and choose whether to read it at the moment or not, and if they ignore it, they can always come back to it as the forums also serve as an archive / institutional memory. If you are interested in some of these processes or the use of the forums in teaching, please email me (one condition - see last sentence).

The forums are not as easy to use as I would like, but we try to help people along as best we can while I consider options to simplify.

In August of 2003, the garden began to use weblog software for a number of tasks, starting with content management and links databases. With regards to content management, there were a number of immediate advantages: distribute the task of adding content to the site; items could be saved as drafts and then published after editorial review (and added in the past two weeks is the ability to “future” publish); archive of past events as an institutional history; and perhaps the most intriguing was the ability to use RSS feeds to deliver targetted content across the web site.

For example, on the main page of the site, three RSS feeds are used to dynamically generate some content: “Top News and Events”, “The Garden Weblog” and “Photo of the Day”. The weblog feed includes the latest seven entries in the weblog by date. However, the content of the weblog can be targetted through the use of categories, and so on our Plant Conservation page, the RSS feed takes only the weblog entry that were categorized under “Plant Conservation”.

We are starting to use outside RSS feeds to add external content to the site. On our Resources and Writings page, I last week added an RSS feed from Scott's Botanical Links, a nearly-daily botanical link that has been on the web for almost ten years (and only recently outputted RSS).

Our experience with RSS has led us to start development of a gateway web site that aggregates distributed content from a federation of databases via XML. If you are interested in being informed when the site approaches some level of functionality, please email me and I'll drop you a note when you can have a look at it (again, one condition, please see last sentence).

I should take a step back and note that we've recently launched Botany Photo of the Day (read more here and here). Our intent is a blend of: science education with personal stories and expertise of staff and researchers. Into the mix, we also add community contribution and highlighted items and events of interest to readers (e.g., a lead-up to the launch of the garden's new book is planned to be supplement by images). You might also be interested to see our experimentation with image annotation software by following the link at the top of this photo of the day entry.

A design feature of the BGCPR's federation of sites is the use of cascading style sheets as a common style template (a change in font size on one site cascades to all other sites immediately - no fuss, no muss). CSS is used for tableless layout, which allows screen readers to properly parse the web page for audio browsing of the web; this is part of our commitment to accessibility. Unfortunately, the forums software is too difficult to rewrite as tableless layout for accessibility, which is quite problematic (and another reason to simplify).

Our BC Flora web site uses CSS experimentally to act as visual / audio cues and to add contextual glossary items. In this search for the genus Lupinus, native plants of British Columbia are surrounded by strong tags as a visual / audio cue. If you click through to any of the species, roll your mouse cursor over the data header for “scientific name” to see the use of CSS to create an “available yet unobtrusive” contextual glossary item.

That's a quick overview of what we've accomplished with a small glimpse into thoughts for the future. If you want more information about any of the above, please email me (click on my name below), but also note the following condition: please supply one suggestion for a usability, content, functionality or ? improvement to the garden's web site - I could use the feedback, because I am too familiar with the site, and I really need (and appreciate) fresh perspectives.

Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 11:59 PM on April 15, 2005