Archival Tools Component

Developed by Jay Benson

This tool allows an administrator of the Zamani Data Archive to ingest or purge metadata from the Fedora Repository. This provides the mechanism for controlling the content that is make available in the Archive.

Introduction

The Archival Tools allow an administrator of the Zamani Data Archive to ingest collections or sub-collections. Additionally, Collections can either be purged or individual records in the repository via their Personal Identifier.

Implementation

Both the ingest and purge functionality are provided through cURL requests to the Fedora Repository. After either an ingest or purge has been performed the indexing of the archive is updated to ensure it contains the current set of objects in the archive. In order to improve the performance of the Solr search functionality the indexes are optimised after they have either been ingested or purged. Optimising the indexes is similar to a defragmentation command. This operation is used to reorganise the indexes into segments, increasing search speed.

Results

Usability Testing

A usability test was conducted with 15 participants, consisting of University of Cape Town students. The System Usability Scale (SUS) was used to measure user's perceived usability of the Archival Tools to meet its intended purpose. Every participant was able to complete all the tasks in the usability test for the archival tasks.

The Archival Tools received a mean SUS score of: 79.6875

User Acceptance Testing

In order to evaluate whether the requirements of the project were met, a user acceptance test was used. This testing allowed the development team to demonstrate all the required functionality of the system to the clients. Additionally, the clients were asked to evaluate whether the requirements of each component of the Zamani Data Archive were met. The requirement-based test case criteria for the Archival Tools are shown below.

ID	Criteria
3.1	Ingesting
3.1.1	Ingest metadata produced by Meta-fy
3.1.2	Ingest a sub-set of a collection
3.2	Purging
3.2.1	Purge collection
3.2.2	Purge list of records

After the demonstration of the Archival Tools the Zamani team were asked to evaluate whether the criteria had been met. The results of this evaluation can be seen below.

ID	Test Cases	Pass/Fail	Tested By	Date Tested
3.1	Ingesting	Pass	Zamani Team	20/10/2014
3.2	Purging	Pass	Zamani Team	20/10/2014

Conclusion

In order to provide a subjective label for the outcome of the Usability Test an adjective rating scale (seen below) was used. Using this scale we that the Archival Tools fell between the 'Good' and 'Excellent' categories. It can thus be deduced that the tools provide a high level of user perceived usability.


SUS adjective rating scale

All test cases where passed in the user acceptance testing, which confirmed that the original requirements of the project had been met. The overall reception from the client was excellent. This was confirmed when the client indicated that they felt the Zamani Archive was ready for production. The clients indicated that they wished to do future work on the Archive, including improvements and new requirements such as adding more of their data set to the project.