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From Outdated to Outstanding: The Piaggi Hat Collection's Journey to Figshare

Mark Hibbett and Anab Hussen, University of the Arts London

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  • Europe's largest specialist university for art and design
  • World Top 2 university for art and design
  • Six colleges
  • Teaching-focused

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Anna Piaggi

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Old system

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Existing data

Data

Colours

Dimensions

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Old system

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Figshare

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Exporting the data

  • Weird format
  • Reformatting in Access
  • Add custom fields
  • Trying in small batches
  • Figshare worked well for data…

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The Problem

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The Solution

FILL IN BACKGROUNDS 

This will create a correctly sized thumbnail image for an item 

  • Go into "My Data" in Figshare 
  • Click on the title of the item to edit 
  • Click on "Preview item" towards the bottom of the right-hand menu 
  • There will be 2 or more images - click on the "Download file" button for one of the images - by default use the forward-facing one but you can choose a different one if it's more descriptive. 
  • Save it on your laptop somewhere. 
  • Go to photoshop (it takes a while to open, so if you're doing several of these leave it open). 
  • Click "File", "Open" (and "On your computer" if it tries to get you to use the cloud) and open the image you've just saved. 
  • Click "Image" and then "Canvas Size..." 
  • It should say Width 667 and Height 1000. Change Width to 1500 - this will make the image wider, with white stripes on either side of the original picture. 
  • Choose the Magic Wand icon. 
  • Click the left hand side of the image where it's all white. 
  • Press the Shift key on your keyboard - keep it pressed and then click the right hand side of the image. This should select both sides. 
  • Click "Edit" and then "Content-Aware Fill..." (not "Content-Aware Scale"!) 
  • Give photoshop a moment to work it out - the preview image should show a filled-in background. Click "OK" 
  • Click "File", "Export", "Quick Export As PNG" 
  • A new box will come up - click "Save" to save this new thumbnail in the same place as before. 
  • Close the image - if it asks if you want to save changes, say "No" (it's already saved as a PNG) 
  • A warning box will appear. Click "Submit for review" here too. 

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ADD THUMBNAIL 

This will add the newly created thumbnail to the item you got it from 

  • Go back to Figshare. 
  • If the preview is open close it to go back to the edit screen for the item. 
  • Click "Add custom thumbnail" 
  • Click "Choose image" 
  • Choose the version of the thumbnail that ends with .png 
  • Click "Close" 
  • You're now back at the edit item screen.  Click "Save Changes". 
  • Click "Submit for review" 
  • A warning box will appear. Click "Submit for review" here too. 

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End result

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Other benefits

  • Safely stored
  • Usage metrics
  • Tags

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https://figshare.arts.ac.uk/piaggi

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Conclusions

  • Imports worked really well
  • Great that it's discoverable
  • Assumptions made about screenshots are wrong

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https://figshare.arts.ac.uk/Piaggi