ALEG

What I've done

• Thesaurus - enhanced the Place Mapping program to show in which agents or works a place was being used (as an aid to the mapping)

• Completed mapping of the 600 awards left over from last week. These were the awards entered into the new Austlit system as text notes since February, and were highly variable in format (so some of the mappings were quite radical!).

  The program to match pending "Literay award" topics to the new awards was rerun after this exercise, but only a few new mappings were automatically found, and there are still almost 240 unmapped "Literary award" topics which require manual processing.

• Mapped the "Australian Publisher" topics. Most of these were mapped to existing publishers, but about 70 new agents were created for publishers I could not identify as existing agents.

• The date handling module was overhauled in preparation for subsuming the current temporary date hierarchy stored in the new thesurus. Rendering was improved (to display 1920-1929 as 1920s or 192?, and 1900-1999 as 20th century (not 19th - thanks Gillian) or 19?? depending on context) and support for "BC" dates was added.

  A small improvement to the handling of "First Known Dates" was made, but further work (to store First Known Date at the expression as well as the work level) is still pending).

• Work has begun on implementing the new version of the "Simple" search and a "Guided" search. The form layouts have been done and basic infrastructure to manage and remember the search parameters using a simple cookie and user session objects. Hopefully this will be operational next week.

Next Week

• More thesaurus conversion/mapping and user interface.

• More simple and guided search implementation.

• Lu Rees data - discussions with Marie-Louise, Megan, Belle and Marlene.

• First known dates (expression level).

• 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. Chris and Terry have also noticed similar incidents, so I think a very careful look at all place assignments to places occuring in multiple states/countries is warranted.