User Interface Team Final Presentation and Report CS 5604: Information Storage and Retrieval

The Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) project concept has evolved for years now and has been undergoing improvements across key themes. The Information Retrieval course at Virginia Tech led by Dr. Edward A. Fox has been at the forefront of implementing a robust ETD system. In this submission, we document our contribution to the system as Information Retrieval course students for the Fall 2023 academic year. The overall project tasks were divided into 6 teams. Team 6 was in charge of the User Interface. The state of the system at the beginning of the semester was a fragmented interface with several independent implementations done by students who took this course in the past. Our main task was to merge these into one robust and consistent user interface. We were also tasked with upgrading the loosely implemented authentication system so that users can securely sign up for the system, and interact with User Interface (UI) pages supporting new user roles of curator and experimenter. It was our responsibility to meet these requirements in collaboration with other teams, especially with Team 5, which provided the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). We accomplished the main goals of one consistent user interface that supports all of the functionality of the ETD system including new user roles and a secure system for signing up and logging in. This submission details these accomplishments, as well as how to use the frontend of the ETD system.