Ian has recently become a contributing editor with the Orlando Project.

He needs to build entries and collect reference and primary materials to begin creating entries but is not familiar with the technical underpinnings of SGML or XML encoding. He is generally familiar with editing tools and has an extensive background in the subject matter of the project.

The Orlando dashboard allows him to monitor his progress on the entries that have been sent to him for initial research and to request assistance with contextual or technical problems that he encounters.

He uses Orlando integrated text and document management to consult online sources, to encode entries and submit them to the Orlando work flow.

Ian is diligently working to complete his dissertation on the influence of the Chartists on broadsheet publication in nineteenth century London. One of the members of his committee is involved with the O.Canada project and has contracted him as a research contributor. Ian is quite handy with general office applications, but prior to starting to work with O.Canada had never heard of XML, TEI or been involved with a collabourative online project. Although unfamiliar with the tools, Ian is eager to learn and is a very dedicated researcher.

Challenges

Opportunities

Scenario 1

1. Ian logs into DEEP.
2. His personalised dashboard view shows the entry on Rita Joe that is assigned to him and the communication threads relating to this entry. He notes that he has had a new entry for Pauline Johnson assigned to him, but puts that aside for the moment.
3. He reads a new message from Cheryl who has solved his problem encoding the entry for Rita Joe.
4. Ian chooses to view the finished document so that he can appreciate how Cheryl solved his problem. At this stage its status has been changed to proofed, and he no longer can edit it as it is now in the approval process.
5. He is able to view the document, and the editor is launched when he clicks on the document. The big ah-ah moment as he notes how Cheryl has encoded the date of publication that he was unfamiliar with.
6. As a quick reference, Ian adds a copy of Cheryl's message to his own research log tagged with 'XML', 'Dates' and 'Methodology' so that he can refer to it in the future when he has to do similar encoding.
7. Ian closes the document and returns to his dashboard to explore the new entry for Emily Pauline Johnson that has been assigned to him and marked with a status of 'assigned'.
8. He selects the entry which has already had the standard biographical template applied. There are two attached notes from Cheryl, one giving some broad instructions and a second one with a link to a website on Pauline Johnson and suggestions for two useful print resources.
9. Ian does a quick search of the library catalogue and requests the critical biography; he'll be notified by email when it's ready for pickup.
10. Ian then clicks on the website link from Cheryl and scans the site to get a quick feel for the information contained there and gain a quick overview of the nature of the entry that he will be working with.
11. With the website visible in the DEEP integrated browser, Ian does a rapid screen scrape of the material and it is stored as a document in the Pauline Johnson dossier in DEEP.
12. The scrape that Ian carries out is automagically passed through a tidy tool as well as a datefinder tool accessible through DEEP. These output a simple plain text document that subsequently has basic encoding applied for his initial consideration.
13. Ian returns to the entry in DEEP. The template applied has provided the basic encoding for the biographic components that he will need to research. In a separate panel in DEEP, all references to Pauline Johnson currently referenced in other O.Canada entries are listed.
14. A separate panel provides Ian with a list of the standard sources that all researchers consult as part of their preliminary research. These include not only reference materials, but also sources (such as OCLC) helpful in finding biographies and autobiographies of entry subjects as well as family members and friends, editions of letters, etc., and databases (such as MLA International Bibliography, JSTOR, Project Muse, etc.) helpful in finding articles about entry subjects. Ian decides to start with a basic reference book and clicks on the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online to start to assemble the Johnson entry.
15. He is able to quickly find references to other family members in the DCB. As he locates these, he clicks the scrape button which adds pages to the working dossier.
16. As the pages appear in the dossier, he is able to link the bibliographic entry to the encoded links by dragging the icon of the page into the entry editor.
17. He inputs the data in his own language, attached to a correct bibliographical citation. He marks this with an asterisk as a reminder to himself to check against the original at least twice (at the start of the next work session and before submitting the document to Cheryl for review) to see how close it seems to the original and to make changes if it seems too close.
18. Having successfully added a substantial amount of information to the entry, Ian decides to call an end to his research day as work on his own dissertation calls. He finishes up his session by spending a few minutes reading through what he's added for purely stylistic self-criticism and revision.
19. When he goes to save his entry, it is validated against the XML stylesheet. The tagging wizard intervenes to ask him whether the attribute for "position" in the element, which is currently empty, should be given a value. The appropriate section of the tagging documentation appears in the panel with the query, so he can quickly decide what to do.
20. Ian accepts the advice of the tagging assistant and fills in a value for the empty attribute. (Had he not had the information at hand to respond to this query he could have declined to accept the tagging assistant's advice. He would then be prompted again the next time the document was validated against the stylesheet).
21. Before logging out, he responds to Cheryl's helpful note to let her know that he was able to find the site and thanks her for sending it. He also thanks her for the suggestions of print resources, and proposes a time he could stop by her office to pick up the volume of EPJ's letters. As he closes his session, the status of the Johnson entry is changed to in process and a notification is automatically generated and dispatched to Cheryl as the supervisory editor.

User needs to collect material subtantiate editorial decisions. What is this process? How will supporting multimedia sources be handled? How do we imagine and child/parent relationships in JiTR?