RSSA peak at MuckRock’s improved document timelines
Jan 09
One thing we weren’t really happy with was how “seperated” out scanned-in responses were from the general request timeline. It meant you had to flip back and forth between tabs to get a good understanding of the request process, or worse had to scroll up and down, downloading PDFs and opening them just to figure out what the fix required was for your current request. Particularly for embargoed requests, in which we’re restricted in how we use DocumentCloud (the document display software we use), the following was a fairly common sight:
What dreck! It didn’t even give you the download link there: You had to scroll up and find the right attachment. Well, Mitch and I got together, came up with a mockup for a better way, and he pulled it together. Ta-da!
Much more useful. If you click view, you’re taken to the full document view in the “Documents” tab. If you click download, you download the PDF directly. But you don’t have to do either, since there’s a nice little summary telling you what the document is all about. If your request is embargoed, you’ll see a generic document thumbnail, but you’ll still see the request summary and be given the download link.
This has actually been live for a few weeks, but we’ve been kicking out the bugs in the meantime. It now seems to work just how we want it to for both embargoed and non-embargoed requests, even if you switch the request’s status.
Two last notes: This feature probably won’t be ported back for old requests, unless you specifically ask by e-mailing me the requests you’d like updated to the timeline view. I’m perfectly happy to do it in these cases, but it’s a manual process. Also, this does not apply (yet) to non-document attachments, like databases and Excel files. We’ve received surprisingly few of these so far, and we’d like to get some more before we figure out how to integrate them consistently into the MuckRock system.
