ALEG

What I've done

• Almost the entire week was spent formatting and loading the Lu Rees reviews.

  This was probably the most challenging dataset to load because of the variability of the formatting of the supplied data and the significant intersection of data with already existing data (works, reviews, agents, sources).

  Eventually, 2644 new reviews were created, which involved the co-creation of 204 new periodicals, 990 new periodical issues and 389 new agents.

  About 850 reviews were not loaded because the work being reviewed does not exist (yet) in AustLit, or no work being reviewed was provided in the review record, or no source or a "strange" source was provided in the review record.

  What to do with these will be discussed next week.

  Given the great difficultly in formatting these reviews and the even greater difficultly faced with the remaining (but smaller) gateway datasets, we'll probably opt to process those datasets manually - certainly, many of the the records would require human interpretation.

• Created a bunch of anonymous agents (one per work previously authored by "Anonymous") with the year they flourished taken from the first known date of the work. This approach is being discussed by the team.

• Discussed with Marie-Louise and Annette changes to the design for the "static" part of the web site - about, help, dataset, trail pages, etc.

• Something I forgot from last week (and it seems opportune to mention it now to pad out the rather dismal achievement of this week): a search "governor" was added to the database query infrastructure which cancels queries which run "too long". The current definition of "too long" is currently between 2 and 3 minutes for the initial query, but is easily changed.

Next Week

• More thesaurus conversion/mapping and user interface.

• Result formatting from simple and guided searches.

• 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. Dan, 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.