ALEG
Weekly Report - Week 13, 27 July 2001
What I've done
- More work on the prototype site - some tweaks to the formatting (stylesheet),
processing model, DTD and clip library and lots more
prototype documents.
- Added the first cut of the holdings lookup (to Kinetica). Special thanks
to James Bullen of the NLA for running all the server side ("target") code and
providing most of the client ("origin") code. Incorporating it into the ALEG server was quite
straight-forward. There are a few issues regarding exactly what is being
searched, and the server seems to fail occassionaly, but overall it is
looking promising. More work when James returns from leave around August 6th.
There are some issues with NUC code lookups - keeping our NUC list
up-to-date, or looking them up at NLA - low priority!
- Started processing the new thesaurus files. We have many issues to resolve
on use of the thesaurus, mainly to do with using words from higher level
topics and their synonyms when matching search expressions, but these will
be discussed next week. A crude load on the terms and hierarchy structure for the
"concepts" has been done, including loading the synonyms and related terms.
"Enrichment terms" must be added, and then I'll
do the same for the place names. Then we have to map the existing terms
and work through the unmatched terms.
- Still more reports and one-off updates to assist the cleanup effort.
Next Week
- To Do list. Work through the (mostly) minor issues on the to-do
list provided by Annette/Kerry/Marie-Louise.
- Help generating the prototype static web documents.
- Continue with the thesaurus loading/conversion.
Next few weeks
- First known dates.
- Simple, guided, advanced search screen design.
- We've been granted the "austlit.edu.au" domain. Add our server to this
domain in the next few weeks (ie, name will change to www.austlit.edu.au -
the current name will remain as an alias).
Link of the week
If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing well - unless doing it well takes so
long that it isn't worth doing any more. Then you just do it 'good enough'.
From "Programming Perl", Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz
- A Librarian's Perspective on Information Architecture
- Presentation by Roy Tennant, Librarian, University of California
delivered to the American Society for Information Science and Technology conference,
April 2000
Metadata = cataloging by those paid better than librarians.