Discussion of Overall Cookbook Structure

[andypbarrett]

I'm starting this discussion thread to seed some ideas about the overall cookbook structure.

Do we have the right sections?
Are the title for each section descriptive enough?
Are there better titles?

If you have comments about specific sections. Start a separate discussion for each section.

[dalincanta]

Hello Andy! I have limited knowledge about GitHub page layouts and structures so I don’t know if this would make sense. But as a user, I would find it easier to locate information if the sections were organized in groups of related content within broader categories, arranged in a learning progression (e.g., "Getting Started" → "Finding Data" → "Working with Data"). Perhaps you could implement a toggle feature—similar to the one used for "How do I..."—where users can click to reveal related content based on the data interaction context they are in?

If you don't mind, here's how I might reorganize the sections:

Introduction

Welcome
About Our Cookbook
Getting Started (prerequisites, EDL login, accounts)

Understanding NSIDC Data

Types of data at NSIDC
Common file formats
Map projections and grids
NASA collections and granules

Finding and Accessing Data

Dataset search and discovery
Data access methods
Using APIs and programmatic access (I’ll add What is an API? in this page)

Working with NSIDC Data

Tools we use (Suggested title: Tools overview)
Reprojecting data
Working with NetCDF files
Plotting NSIDC Data (Suggested title: Plotting and visualization)

Practical Guides and Examples

Datasets (Suggested title: Dataset-specific tutorials)
Best practices

[andypbarrett]

Great ideas

[frizatch]

Seconding these categories! They will help users jump to the pertinent section when they access the cookbook. The "How To..." pieces can be wrapped into the last section ... perhaps with the title change to:

Practical Guides, Examples and Other Recipes

[frizatch]

Getting started

The design of this section is going to be the most difficult, perhaps. I think it's important to have ALL of the structure explained that let's someone operate, but it needs to be minimalist (all the instructions visible w/o scrolling) - OR start with a bullet list overview that gives the user a complete sense of what needs to be done to get going (the earthdata login, how to get set up with the notebook, etc.)

[frizatch]

"Getting Started" and "Quick Start" are possibly two different things. Maybe the "Getting Started" could be relabeled as "Orientation" or something if we decide to do both.

[dalincanta]

Hi Diane! I agree that Getting Started and Quick Start serve different purposes.

Quick Start guides, in my head, are concise tutorials for specific tasks, while Getting Started is a comprehensive section covering prerequisites and setup requirements.

I'm drafting a new outline for our NASA Earthdata Cloud Data Access Guide in our help center. I'm considering adding a Getting Started section with Quick Start guides nested within it for three common scenarios: finding cloud-hosted data (using Earthdata Search GUI seems simplest), basic download of a cloud-hosted dataset (thinking Earthdata Downloader), and simple Python access of a cloud-hosted dataset. I'm still uncertain about this last one. I am posting this here to check if you have similar content planned for the Cookbook - it would be so awesome to link to this potential basic Python access within our cloud data access documentation.

To illustrate:

Getting Started

• Prerequisites and setup requirements
• Setting up Earthdata Login
• Quick note on Cloud Access Pathways (local vs within cloud)
• Quick start guides
  • Finding cloud-hosted datasets
  • Basic data download: GUI
  • Simple Python access

[frizatch]

I diagrammed-out a possible structure for the cookbook here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1cfLl5Ef2KlFqCoKXIEQWtt-NOXwrrIM_5HeWk5FC0U4

This was the basis for my reorg attempt at the _quarto.yml file