WalterMcGinnis.com :Help

Add a New Topic

• Title : A few words.
• Short summary: a sentence summarising or introducing the topic.
• Description: this field can be as long as you like and is the body of the topic. You can use the Kete Text Editor tools to format your text if you like, with bolding, highlighting or italics. You can insert tables, weblinks or images
• Tags : Tags are keywords which are used to search Kete. You don't need to enter words already used in the title, summary or description. Enter as many as you like, separated by a comma. Think about who the people are, what the subject matter is, what the items or objects or places are. When was the photo taken? The more tags you enter here the more chance we have of other people finding it! This field is optional

Link to a Related Existing Topic

Once you have written your Topic you can link it to existing Topics and Items, forming webs of related material. At the bottom of each Topic page, you will find  +Link to related topic

Click on this and a pop up window will appear with a search box. Enter a keyword or two and a list of Topics that match your search will appear. Select them by clicking on the white box to the left. As each one is linked it will disappear from the list and be replaced with the message "Topic Linked Succesfully". When you have finished close the window.

If you are unsure whether a Topic is related or not you can go to the Topic detail page by clicking on the Topics title, and the Topic will open in a separate window. Close the window when you are finished by clicking the red cross in the top right corner. 

Add a new Item

Adding any of the different Item type all happen with broadly the same process, although they each have slightly different onscreen forms to fill in:

1. Select the item type you want to add:

• Images
• Topic
• Documents
• Audio
• Weblinks.

Go to the right tab, depending on your choice above, from either the search or browse screens. At the bottom of the screen you will find a link: Ädd a new Image  (or audio or document etc). Click on it and a template will open for you to complete.  

2. Fill out the 3  fields:

• Title
• Short Summary
• Description

3. Browse to the file you want to upload, which must be prescanned and available . Any common file format can be loaded.

4. Complete the optional fields if can.

5.  Click on the Create button.

Images

Images can be digital photographs, digital copies of photographs or digital photographs of objects or things. Any common file format can be used; jpegs for preference. Tiffs will work but they won't generate a thumbnail image in the search results. It is best not to load up large files; 200dpi is fine for internet  display. Remember that many people have slow broadband or dialup connections.

Topic

Weblinks

Sometimes the copyright statement of something you found on the internet forbids you from copying or saving the information. In this case you can add a weblink in Kete which will link back to the place on the internet. You will need to add the url of the web resource, instead of browsing for a file. The url is displayed in the address bar and usually starts with http://www. Instead of copying this long  piece of information down you can copy and paste. Copy by right click on your mouse then selecting copy, or cntrl C. To paste it in either right click - paste or Cntrl V.

The only problem with links is the internet changes all the time, and links which worked last month may not work next month. If you can legally copy the content off into a topic or description thats definitely the best way, but often you can't and a weblink will have to do.

Documents

You can attach most common file types as documents. We have found that compressed jpegs download much faster than normal jpegs. Remember that some people still have dial up connections so make your files smaller if possible.

The documents can be a scan of the original document eg a letter or a page from  a minute book. The contents of the document will not be searchable by Kete, but there are a couple of ways to help people find your document:

Title: Write a short, specific title.
Short summary: A few sentences summarising the contents of the document. This will display on the search results list.
Description: This can be a complete transcript of the document if you wish, or someone else might do this for you.
Tags: enter lots of keywords.

If you want to write your description first, please use a text editor, like Notepad, rather than Word or Word Pad. If you copy and paste from a Word document  into the Description field lots of nasty formatting comes over which you can't see but which  can cause havok with the display.  Copying from Notepad works fine. You will find it  on a Windows system under start, programmes, accessories. Don't do any formatting except paragraphs, because it will all be lost when you paste it into Kete - but you can format it in once you are there ie bold, underline, italics etc.

Documents are a great way to manage large works. Scan each small section, as in a few  pages, and add each section as a separate document. Big pdfs are awful to download.    Gather them all together by linking them to a Publication topic.

Video

Add a related existing Item

Kete has been seeded with about 10,000 images from the collections of Foxton and Horowhenua Historical Societies, plus many hundreds of pages of typed material our volunteers have prepared. These can be linked to Topics.

At the bottom of each Topic page, for each Item type, you will find  +Link image (or documents, audio, video, web link).

Click on this and a pop up window will appear with a search box. Enter a keyword and a list of Images that match your search will appear. Select them clicking on the white box to the left. As each one is linked it will disappear from the list and be replaced with the message "Image Linked Succesfully". When you have finished close the window.

Discussion