Chapter 5: Suggestions
The Adding and Editing Records section of the Adders' Homepage includes two options for suggesting new resources for inclusion in iVia.
Make a suggestion
One of these options is to Make a suggestion. This feature allows you to quickly suggest a resource to your collaborators without taking the time to create a complete record. Figure 5.3 shows the suggestion form.
Figure 5.4: The Make a Suggestion page.
Making suggestions is intended to be fast and simple process, so the form is very simple: a URL is supplied in the first field, and a Title and Description may also be supplied but are not required. The final option, labelled Suggest to, lets the adder choose whether the suggestion is being made to any adder, or to adders from their own institution.
Review Suggestions
The Adders' Homepage also presents a Review Suggestions option. Clicking on this link takes you to a menu that lists several sources of suggested records.
The Adder Suggestions link lists the suggestions made through the Make a suggestion page described above. The Public Suggestions link lists suggestions made by members of the public. Adders can claim these suggestions and create full records from them as is described in Chapter 6: Editing records.
The final options in the Review Suggestions menu, in a section labelled Suggestions from robots, are used to find resources that have been suggested by the iVia "robots". Each link in this section searches the live database for the best automatically robot-related records, and attempts to sort them with the most valuable records presented first.
The first option is to sort the robot records by their iVia Virtual Library Crawler popularity. The records are sorted by the number of times they appear in other virtual libraries (with the most popular first). The other options present the robot-created records sorted by click-through popularity (i.e. the number of times they have been clicked on after appearing in iVia search results), by record views (the number of times iVia users have viewed the record's metadata), and by Automatic Focused Crawler score.