Upcoming Changes to MorphoSource Organizations and Teams

[JulieWinchester]

Hello! There will soon be some changes to simplify and streamline how organizations work on MorphoSource. This message will explain those changes, and you can use this thread to discuss the changes and ask questions of our team and other users. This change will largely affect MorphoSource users who manage organizations and participate in organization teams. Other users will be largely unaffected. These changes are intended to help organization representatives more easily navigate MorphoSource and use its many features to track and manage media representing objects from your collection or imaged by devices from your facility. Nothing has changed yet. If you are an organization manager member, you will receive follow up emails when these changes go live for your specific organization. The rest of this email will contain details on what is happening, and when you can expect it to happen.

What’s Changing?

• Your organization will remain largely as it is now, but “organization teams” will cease to exist. Instead, all of the features of teams are being folded into organizations. You and other MorphoSource users will be members of the organization, with no team interposed between you. All current content (media, objects, projects, etc.) associated with your organization will remain as they are with no changes. As a bonus, you will now be able to edit organization metadata, to ensure your organization is well described.

• Your organization will directly own and manage media! The concept of a single “organization data manager user” (which was already increasingly abstracted away as a group account by many institutions) is going away. Instead, any media owned by the organization can be edited by any member of the organization that has a manager role. Pages for media that are owned by the organization will indicate the organization is the owner of the media. Users who click on the organization name will be directed to the organization’s page.

• If you already have an organization data manager user and your organization participates in the automatic media ownership transfer system, your organization will roll over into the new way of handling things. All organization media previously managed by your data manager user will be shifted over to be managed by the organization. The former data manager of your organizational team will be added as an organization manager. All members of the previous organization team will become organization members with an equivalent role. All organization members with a manager role will receive and can decide on newly incoming media ownership transfer requests.

• If your organization represents an imaging facility, we are adding many new powerful features to empower imaging facilities. You will be able to view and edit your organization’s devices, and soon you’ll be able to create new device records. You will also be able to easily see media imaged by your devices. And we are beginning to mint persistent ARK identifiers for all organization and imaging device records on MorphoSource, which will give you a URL resolvable identifier for imaging devices. We will reach out further to imaging facilities to give you more detail on this soon.

When Are Things Changing?

We will begin to roll out these new features across the month of May. The changes will be deployed slowly and organization-by-organization, which means some organizations may have already changed over while others are still waiting for the new features to be live for them. For each organization, we will kick off a relatively quick migration process. When this process begins for an organization, organization managers will receive an email from MorphoSource indicating the process has begun. During this time, we would recommend not changing any important settings pertaining to your organization. When the migration process is finished, you will receive another email. In general, the smaller your organization is, the sooner you will see these new features come online.

I Have Questions!

We understand this may seem like a pretty big change. We’ve decided to make these changes because we feel it helps to simplify the organization features of MorphoSource, which will make the site easier to understand and more straightforward to use. In turn, we hope this helps organization collections and facilities to accomplish their many and varied strategic goals for which they use MorphoSource, such as tracking and managing media, documenting use and reuse impact, and connecting with scholars and the public. Please use this discussion thread to discuss the changes, ask questions, and read answers from our team. Or, as always, please feel free to send us an email at [email protected]. Thanks for using MorphoSource!