Notes on Pleiades Release of 2 April 2007
Below is a list of items which I think we may want to address in future versions of Pleiades.
1. Under the Ancient Places Tab when the user chooses to search the "Roman" time period she is directed to a list of all the sites attested for the Roman period. Excellent. But, I would make one suggestion. We should re-order the list so that all of the "unknown" places come last and not first.
2. I am wondering if the "Ancient Names" tag is necessary. This is what the user sees right now:
Ancient geographic or ethnic names are set in the context of an ancient place via association with an ancient location.
The ancient names of Pleiades are too numerous to be browsed. You may search for them using the search box located in the upper right-hand corner of most pages in the site, or you may go directly to the advanced search form.
For the benefit of search engines, the entire (warning: huge) listing is here.
The first part, in my opinion, is a definition and should be included in the "Pleiades Thesaurus". The second paragraph seems unnecessary. I immediately wonder why it is not possible to browse all the names. This is a feature people might like to have since sometimes they do not know the name they are looking for.
Furthermore the inclusion of an "Ancient Places" tab and an "Ancient Names" tab is a bit confusing to me (but maybe just to me!)
3. I cannot recall why we are calling it the "Pleaides Thesaurus". I'm wondering if "Pleiades Definitions" might be more accessible to the masses; or we might call the tab "Explanations of terms used in Pleiades" or the less clunky "Terms in Pleiades".
4. In my member folder, under the "properties" tab the title (or perhaps it is a command) of the page is "Edit Folder". This is a bit confusing to me because there is another tab called "Edit Folder".
That's all for now. The new version is clearer than the previous. I am especially happy to see the removal of the iterated navigation bar. Also, everything seems to load a bit quicker now. Nice work everybody!!
