While the Topic dropdowns (Plants and Seeds, By Topic, By Publication, etc) provide a great place for users to discover the breadth of information available on ECHOcommunity, it is the Search bar that gives users the most power to discover the resources appropriate to their needs.
The Search Bar has a dropdown which allows the user to choose among several ‘searchable’ groups. When searching for most Resources, that selection is already in place and the user can type in the word or words desired. If searching for Cacao, for example, the search response provides a list of books, articles, videos, etc that reference Cacao. In this case 173 items are found. Down the left side, you can see that 170 were in English, 37 are available in Spanish, 32 in French. Other filters are selectable, as well.
Icons on the items in the list indicate whether the item is a link or video or book. There is also a special icon available (circled in purple) which indicates a curated Collection containing an organized list of resources. Collections are weighted to appear near the top of a search list. Collections are available on numerous topics and include collections for organizations and individuals who have a significant body of work represented within ECHOcommunity.
Below you will find a Collection for Moringa Resources. This collection was discovered the same way as the Cacao Collection above, but we have then clicked on the Collection to open up the full Collection list.
Here are a few features of ECHOcommunity Collections that may be helpful to you.
- Collections can be sorted manually as we at ECHO construct them. We try to push the most helpful resources toward the top of the list.
- Gray Circle. Resources that have been ‘tagged’ have the tag words showing under each resource. Users can click on any tag word to discover other resources with the same tag word.
- Green Circle. Books - the ECHOcommunity book list is accessed on this link and is preset to search on the assigned topic, in this case Moringa.
- Purple Circle. Conversations - when possible, a direct link to the Conversations’ Category pertaining to the topic is linkable here.
- Orange Circle. Related Topics - this link or links will take you to other related Collections.
- Brown Circle. Permanent Links or Shortlinks. Clicking on the copy icon in the brown circle allows you to copy the shortlink and paste it to an email or other message. This is easier than copying the long URLs in the address bar.