User Account Improvements

Status: Needs more design

Standardized Author Names (authority file)
Goal: All content for a single author can be collected on a single page.

Requirements:
 * Each author has one and only one entry in Dryad.
 * When new content is added to Dryad, the submitter can easily select an author name from an existing list of authors. Of course, it will still be possible to add new authors.
 * Clicking on an author's name in an item display will navigate to an Author Page.

Open questions:
 * How will submitters select between authors with similar names?
 * Would it be easier to provide curators with a tool for cleaning up names?
 * Do we want a quick solution (e.g., get name authorities from ISI and hook into the DSpace browse index)? Or something longer term (e.g., implement a local authority database)?

Notes:
 * DSpace 2.0 will allow author names to be stored as objects in the repository.
 * Dorothea Salo recently wrote an article on the state of authority files in repositories.
 * Harvard has started work on attaching authority/vocabulary control to any field.

Author Pages
Goal: Allow authors to track the usage of, and citations of, their content in Dryad.

Requirements:
 * An author should be able to point to a single page that contains all information about the author's publications. Viewable information includes:
 * Publication name
 * Publication authors
 * Number of times the publication has been viewed.
 * Number of times datasets for this publication have been downloaded.
 * This summary information exists even for all authors in Dryad, even if they have not created a Dryad account. (e.g., they are listed as a coauthor)

Open questions:
 * Can we get some of this info from BibApp? We may at least be able to use their code for connecting to RIS, Medline, Refworks XML.
 * Do we want to display statistics for individual datasets, or keep things lumped under publications?
 * Is there information that needs to be displayed on these pages beyond simple download counts? (e.g., most common co-authors, most common keywords)
 * Do we want to track information that would normally come from web access logs or Google Analytics? (e.g., links to an item page, search terms used to find an item)
 * Should this information be displayed on separate pages, or can it be integrated into the "browse by author" pages? This depends a bit on the answers to the above questions.
 * Is this information always public? Or is there information that we want to be viewable only by the author (and Dryad admins)?

Notes:
 * See notes on the current capabilities of DSpace Statistics modules.
 * See Cornell's Vivo tool.