ALEG

What I've done

• Yet another week spent almost entirely on analysing the new thesaurus and mappings and adding maintenance functions to the user interface and improving the mapping tools. The ADFA team have been hard at work adding new terms and thousands of new mappings.

  I've started tackling the topics-which-should-be agents, so we now (finally!) have Barry Manilow as a (non-AUSTLIT) agent on the database. If that doesn't make the search engines sit up and take notice, we'll just have to add Brittney Spears and 'N Sync. A few hundred of these topics matched existing agents, but about 2,000 new agents were created.

  Then I'll start on the strange concepts which we've had trouble mapping and topics-which-should-be-works - there are about 727 left of these!

• Only a few more reports and one-off updates to assist the cleanup effort.

• Thought about (and did some tests) adding some 'dynamism' to the static pages, such as the list of indexed journals.

• More thesaurus conversion/mapping and user interface.

• To Do list. Work through the (mostly) minor issues on the to-do list provided by Annette/Kerry/Marie-Louise.

• First known dates.

• Simple, guided, advanced search screen design.

• William noticed that some of the place-of-publication data for loaded records is wrong where the name of the place of publication (town or city) occurs in more than one state (eg Richmond, Glebe). I'll investigate when we map the spatial thesaurus.

Links of the week

Our conscious  mind is constantly  reducing  visual
input into patterns... the philosophy is to present
the components on the screen as recognizable visual
patterns [so that] the user can choose, on a purely
pattern-matching,  unconscious level, which objects
to consider consciously.

• World Wide Words Investigating international English from a British viewpoint

  A very distracting site!

• The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech delivered by John Gordon, April 1984

  Described by Bruce Schneier in his August 15, 2001 Crypto-gram newsletter as "perhaps the funniest speech about cryptography ever given"