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NYU Manifold Tips & Resources

This guide provides an in-depth exploration of Manifold's features and walkthroughs for developing projects beyond initial creation. This is the second of two NYU Manifold LibGuides.

Congratulations on getting your Project, Texts, and Resources set up! Now, you can take the more involved steps for designing your Projects and how content will appear to Readers, including adding content and determining your Project’s structure, configuring viewing and editing permissions, and adding or editing metadata for your Project.

Customizing Project Content and Layout

The first thing Readers see when opening a Project is its homepage composed of Content Blocks. For Project Creators and Editors, The Layout tab is a page in the Admin View of your Manifold Project that allows you to design this.

 

You can include as many or as few content blocks as you wish. After creating your Project, the layout tab will be pre-populated with some content blocks based on your answers to the questions that were asked when creating your Project. These selected content blocks are those that would most likely serve the type of Project you are creating; however, you can always add or remove any content blocks you wish to have on your home page.

 

For details on how to set up and edit the layout of your Project, including how to add Resources and Texts to your Project’s landing page, see the Project “Layout” documentation for Manifold.

Managing Access and Edit Permissions

Once published, anyone can view or publicly annotate your Projects or Texts in NYU Manifold, but you can manage the Reader and Project Contributor access to each of your Projects through that specific Project’s settings. These two categories of access are referred to as “Project Entitlements” and “Editor Permissions” respectively for Readers and Project Contributors. For instructions on how to configure these permissions for your Project, see the documentation on Project “Access.”

  • Note that providing Project Contributor permissions does not automatically list that Contributor in the visible metadata for the Project. For naming Authors and Contributors and generating their affiliated Maker Records, see “Customizing Project Properties and Metadata” below.

Customizing Project Properties and Metadata

Though Manifold helpfully generates and stores a lot of basic metadata for Projects and their content, you can actively shape what metadata appears to Readers and how it displays within your Project.

 

We recommend all NYU Manifold Users include the following pieces of metadata in their Project display, though this is ultimately up to your discretion as a Project Creator:

  • Title
  • Author(s)
  • Description - laying out the content, origin, and intended audience for your Project.
  • Latest Update or Publication Date
  • Subject(s) and Tag(s) - these features are especially important for increasing Project discoverability and connecting your scholarship within the larger community of publishing and reading on NYU Manifold.

 

For instructions on how to update the Metadata for your Projects, see the “Project Properties” article in the Manifold documentation.

 

For a better understanding of metadata categories in Manifold, which are informed by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative’s standards, see the “Metadata” article in Manifold’s documentation.