NYU Manifold Tips & Resources

Don’t go into too much detail with your project description in the Hero Block – this should just give a brief overview of what your readers will see below. If you want to provide greater context and summary, we recommend you use a separate Markdown project content block on your project home page. Your project description should ideally be around 150 words.

Manifold gives you the option to include a Table of Contents - or Contents Block for a Project’s Text. This generates a table of content for a specified Text within the Project - it does not generate a table for the Project as a whole. We recommend that you only include one Contents Block per Project and place it before the Text appears in your Project layout. (Remember that you can organize blocks using the Layout tab in the Manifold Backend.)

To add descriptive text on your Project homepage, you can use Markdown Blocks without needing to ingest or draft any text content externally. Markdown allows you to include headers, bold/italicize/underline text, format text in lists, directly embed media, and more! The basic syntax sheet from Markdown Guide can be helpful or getting started.

Manifold users are strongly encouraged to list Contributors for a Project within the “People” section of the backend. Note that these Contributors don’t need to have their own Manifold user accounts to be listed – they don’t even need to reference still-living authors! Adding these roles is a simple way to provide credit to the creators behind a project, whether they are writers, editors, translators, or anyone you choose to list.

Once a Contributor has been listed on a Project, they will appear as a dropdown suggestion anytime you are adding makers to another Project.

Manifold allows you to include a range of metadata that are meant to share more information about your Project and its contents. These fields can be displayed to your readers through a Project’s Metadata Block or in the Hero Block depending on the kind of 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.
• Copyright (Rights, Rights Holder, Rights Territory, Restrictions) - This simple but important step ensures that your work, even after it’s published on Manifold as an open-access platform, will be used in the ways you intend and that you receive proper credit for its creation. This means including a rights statement and specifying the kind of license or copyright to assign to your project. If you want to increase the visibility and shareability of your work, consider adding a Creative Commons license to your metadata. The Creative Commons website has a license chooser that helps you pick the license that might be right for you. For more on copyright and your rights as a creator, check out the Authors Rights section of NYU Libraries’ Copyright guide.

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.