Landing directly from a search engine to a pdf file in our Omeka S archive seems to be a frequent pattern for people finding our contents.
This is good, to the extent that they find our contents, and we are happy to have pdf files indexed by search engines, but this is also not so good, as pdf files lack context: pdf by themselves have no metadata, and there is no obvious way for a user to go from the pdf itself to find the often fundamental context that is included in the item page (or media) page. This degrades the user experience, and is a missed opportunity for giving more visibility to carefully crafted descriptions and metadata, related items, and to other contents made available through the Omeka S website.
To clarify: the issue I’m outlining is specifically for users who end up on a pdf file directly from search engines, without effectively visiting the Omeka-based website that hosts it.
I’m looking for suggestions and solutions that may alleviate this issue and improve user experience, be they specific to Omeka S or not.
One option I’m considering is to add a standard page before all pdf files: that page would include basic metadata for the given file, as well as links back to the item page. I suppose this should be doable with an Omeka S module, but haven’t found anything similar. Does it perhaps exist?
Not having the skills to develop an Omeka module, I may well try to achieve the same post-publication via the API: retrieve all metadata for a given item/media, create a pdf page with the metadata, merge it with the original pdf, and upload it again, perhaps embedding some of the metadata in the meta fields of the pdf itself for good measure. This is not ideal, but may be doable.
I wonder if in the Omeka community others have found similar issues, and how they approached them.