Tracing the lineage of Story Maps assets

HimanshuMistry

It would be great to find/trace source of the data/asset/owner on a given StoryMap (especially in academic settings). Example: A faculty has been curating a collaborative StoryMap from various students or student groups over three semesters. If some of those students have graduated and links are broken, some way of tracing the lineage or the root of the data/asset/creator would be great for various reasons - transferring data, relinking or copying an asset, getting permission for publishing an asset or citing/giving correct attribution.

OwenGeo · ‎06-12-2023

@HimanshuMistry - Thank you for this feedback. Could you provide some more detail about this situation? I'm not sure what information you are looking for. What types links can be broken and what information would you be looking to be recorded automatically?

There are already multiple places in a story where authors can record information like this such as the attribution field for media and the credits section at the end of the story. If you are already aware of these, please share some details about why or how these do not meet your need.

HimanshuMistry · ‎06-12-2023

@OwenGeo

Sure. (this is not about credit section).

I will try further to explain the same example: Let's say I am the faculty member teaching 'food studies' class every semester. Since last three years, let's say I have taught this class for 6 times with about 20 students in each class. I ask Story Maps as a final project from each student, which then I stitch it into a larger collection of Story Maps - now it has grown to 120 stories with various web maps, images, videos, and such assets, and is published publicly. Students from the first two years have graduated i.e. they do not have access to their Story Maps as they are not currently enrolled (SSO determination). So let's walk through a few hypothetical scenarios:

1. Another researcher "R" sees a specific story in that collection or a specific asset they want to either cite or copy and reaches out to me. It is a mammoth task for me to go and find in a story what those assets are and find out who created it so I can ask that graduated student about prospective researcher "R".

2. Same case and I left the university, now the admin needs to identify the owner of the asset to ask for permission or citation, which is a hassle.

3. A graduated student's story has been incorporated, cited, or embedded by various researchers. This student comes back after 3 years and wants his assets/data moved to his personal account. If the data is copied thats great but if the student does not want to share this data. Now how do one find out where all this has been cited? What links will be broken?

If there is some way to trace the lineage of all assets, it will become very easy to locate, cite, copy, transfer or move that asset. Hope this clarifies my idea.

tt5vw1 · ‎06-16-2023

Additional thoughts that could facilitate this idea:

For each StoryMap item description, there is a section that lists all the linked assets within (i.e. layers within a web map), and also a section that lists the places (within the AGOL ecosystem) where this particular StoryMap has been linked

PatriciaCarbajales-Dale

I agree with the previous clarification. The item description should have for any story map a list of ArcGIS Online items used in the story map (web maps, surveys) and they should be at the very least hyperlinked.

Ultimate dream would be to have a list of items like below:

Type of Content - Link to item - Author

-

Melinda_Kernik

We have a substantial number of StoryMaps in our organization that have been built in collaboration with external partner organizations or for display as part of an in-person museum gallery. These public-facing projects often involve students or other temporary staff, such as group StoryMaps created during a graduate seminar class or story created by students working for a grant-funded initiative. When these students graduate, we recommend that ownership of their StoryMaps as well as the associated web maps and data be transferred to someone who will continue to be actively affiliated with our University (such as their supervisor or professor). This is because the students will lose their university email accounts 1 year after graduation. We need to make sure that everything connected to the story has actually been moved so that the content can continue to be updated and so that we don't accidentally delete related items when cleaning up accounts later. It can be quite difficult to know what web maps and data layers are actually being leveraged in a given StoryMap however. Sometimes students have multiple versions of web maps or data layers and lose track of which ones are actually in use. Sometimes supervisors who have not actively worked on building the story map do not understand how the different items within the ArcGIS Online universe fit together and don't know what to ask for in terms of transferring ownership.

It would be useful to have a way to quickly take inventory of what web maps and data layers are being used within a StoryMap on the item's landing page. This could be similar to how web map item pages include a list of links to all of the data layers being displayed in the map. @PatriciaCarbajales-Dale's idea of having the item type, title of the item, and the username of its owner on the item page would be even better!

PeterKnoop

Perhaps if it is too challenging to keep a real-time list of a StoryMap's referenced ArcGIS Online content, for the Item details model @tt5vw1 and @PatriciaCarbajales-Dale describe, an alternative could be "report" option?

For most of our use cases that touch on this, it is usually after a story has been around for awhile, and is not actively being edited, when we want to see what it is referencing, so that we can chase things down. To address such a need a user could run an on-demand report on a story, and get a list of the referenced ArcGIS Online content at the time of the report. (This is essentially what we do now via an ArcGIS Notebook to get this info.)

The properties I would like to see in a such a report include:

Title (link to Item details page of the item)
Owner (if not part of my org, then also an indication of their org.)
Sharing settings (groups listed in a meaningful way, with links to the group's overview pages)