On March 18, 2021 a new deployment of ELViS (European Loans and Visits System) became available. ELViS 1.0.0 is currently being used to facilitate the 3rd Transnational Access call for SYNTHESYS+ (to fund short-term research visits to consortium institutions) and the 2nd Virtual Access call (to fund digitisation-on-demand requests).
The current version of ELViS is an important milestone in the SYNTHESYS+ project and also towards building DiSSCo — a new world-class Research Infrastructure for natural science collections. We have come a long way since mid 2019 when we started gathering user surveys and requirements with our development partner Picturae. The surveys, workshops and weekly meetings contributed to user-stories. Here is a collection of user stories that have been addressed in this version of ELViS.
ELViS is a great example of a tool that is being built together with the community and the user base that will ultimately use it. As members in the SYNTHESYS+ project are based in different parts of Europe, we were already holding regular zoom meetings to facilitate the development process. Github was extensively used to create wireframes and guide the sprint activities. Although not all the efforts of the SYNTHESYS+ WP6 partners and the talented developers at Picturae are reflected in the following chart, you can see activities based on issues submitted over the past few months during our test and development process.
We still have a long way to go to support the loans and visits transactions but we are excited about the launch of the 3rd Transnational Access call and future of ELViS and DiSSCo.
DiSSCoTech 