Introduction

A hub is a web site where a research community keeps its people, its work, and the software it runs, in one place. This book is for the people who use one: how to get an account, what your member area holds, and what each part of the site is for.

Most people arrive at a hub because someone told them to. A supervisor says the field data is on the hub; a course lists an assignment there; a collaborator sends a link to a model and says run it. This chapter is the five minutes of orientation that makes those instructions make sense. If you already know where you are going, go straight to Getting started.

Every hub is built from the same set of components, but each hub turns on only the ones it needs. If a tab, a menu entry, or a whole section described here is missing on your hub, it has been switched off rather than removed. The administrator's side of those choices is in the Hub managers book; nothing in this book requires access to the administrator interface.

What an account gets you

Most of a hub is readable without logging in. An account is what lets you take part. With one you can:

• keep a member profile that other members can find, and a dashboard you arrange yourself;
• join groups and work in projects;
• contribute resources, publications, wiki pages, blog entries, and collections, and have your name attached to them;
• run tools — simulation and analysis programs that execute on the hub's own machines and appear in your browser — where the hub offers them;
• ask and answer questions, file support tickets, and comment.

Registering is described in Registration. What the hub asks you for varies: the form is assembled from the fields the hub's administrators chose, so two hubs rarely ask exactly the same questions.

An account is specific to one hub. Hubs do not share members with each other, so an account on one hub gives you nothing on another, even when both are Hubzero sites and both accept a sign-in from the same outside service.

How the site is laid out

Three things are worth knowing before you start clicking.

The member area. Everything that belongs to you personally lives under /members. Your own area is at /members/myaccount; another member's public profile is at /members/<their id>. Down the left of that page is a list of tabs — Dashboard, Profile, Account, Groups, Projects, Usage, and so on. Each tab is a separate plugin, and the hub decides which ones exist. The two you will use first are described in Member dashboard and Member profile.

Shared spaces. Groups and projects are the places where several people work on the same thing, and they are not the same thing. A group is a standing community space with its own pages, forum, calendar, blog, and file area — a lab, a course cohort, a committee that keeps going after any one piece of work is finished. A project is a workspace for one piece of research, with files, notes, to-dos, and a path to publishing what comes out of it. A soil hydrology lab might keep a group for its seminar announcements and shared reading, and open a separate project for each field season whose data it intends to release.

Published content. Resources, publications, wiki pages, knowledge base articles, courses, and collections are the hub's library. They are public by default, they carry their authors' names, and the good ones acquire citations and a DOI. Publications covers the guided route from a project to a citable release.

Finding things

There are three different ways to look, and they do not overlap as much as you might expect:

• Search searches the hub's content. What it can reach depends on which search engine the hub runs; the chapter says plainly what is and is not covered.
• Tags collect items of any type that were labelled the same way.
• What's New (/whatsnew) lists recently added items by category, with an RSS feed for each one.

A note on the videos

The page this chapter replaces was a stub that pointed at a series of How-to videos on YouTube. The videos are hosted outside the hub software and the original page carried no working links to them, so nothing here could be checked or preserved. Ask your hub's support staff whether it publishes its own introductory videos.

Where to go next

Getting started walks through the first hour: creating an account, confirming it, filling in a profile, and arranging a dashboard. After that, the rest of this book is organised by feature — see the book's contents.