2004-12-02

being a pest, cont'd.

Hi, I'm an end-user of the eRes system at Washington University in St Louis. I have requested that the library make a change to the summary view of documents, but the administrators (cc) claim that they "have no control" over the display. Surely any modern web application is configurable in the way I'm asking about.

Specifically, the summary view of documents shows only the arbitrary document "title." This default (if it is a default) is profoundly unhelpful for academics. Citations are most frequently given as "author-date" pairs, or maybe a book title; chapters of of books are almost never cited by title. Further, it's clear that richer data are entered about the documents. It should be possible to change the summary view so users don't have to open detail view for six or seven documents in order to find the right one.

How do administrators change display settings? Is it part of the application, or a control file somewhere? Three equal-size columns for "title", file type, and file size is profoundly unhelpful. They should also be resizable, no? A third of my display width for a file size is also a bit ridiculous.

Michael Malecki
PhD Student in Political Science
Washington University in St Louis

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