ALEG

What I've done

• Created a stylesheet for formatting reviews as EAD fragments. This may be handy for Marlene to avoid double entry of reviews into AustLit and the Lu Rees Finding aids. Discussed some changes to the Finding Aids with Marlene and Megan. Produced a file for Marlene of the UC childen's literature catalogue entries which weren't loaded, due to author unknown.

• Move some of the contents of the manifestation "illustration" attribute to "description" and reported on the rest, with a view to eliminating the "illustration" attribute ASAP.

• Applied the new colour schemes and graphics from the web designers (Fuse Box Design) to the AustLit Home Page and static pages.

• Added dynamic fragments to the "static" web pages. The idea of these is to allow dynamic content to be generated and slotted into the otherwise static page. The dynamic fragments are invoked by a special XML tag in the static pages (which are themselves XML documents). This fragment tag is replaced by XML generated by the code invoked by the tag, and is then processed through the XSL stylesheets with the rest of the base XML document.

  Initial uses have been:

  • An On this day panel on the home page showing birth/death of AustLit agents
  • A List of significant journals indexed by AustLit
  • A List of journals indexed by AustLit with web sites

• Discussion on a few of thorny issues (still all pending):
  • Sorting periodical/newpaper issues by something finer than year. None of the volume, number and period attributes are readily sortable!
  • Awards as subjects - should year and placing be part of the subject?
  • Literary festivals - are these agents, subjects or sometimes both?
  • Multiple creation events for a work as a mechanism for allowing date ranges to be associated with agents responsible for works, eg editors of a periodical.

• Enhanced the title and name searching to allow booleans (and or not) and brackets. So, now you can search for:
  • Kong not Hong
  • Lawson not Henry
  • ((Tom or Thom*) and (Kenealy or Keneally)) (hmmm, why not just: t*m* k*n*l*y   ?
  • (olympic* not (melb* or syd* or game*)) or firestone or (dunlop not volle*)

  Phrase searches (in double quotes, such as "Bondi Beach") can also be combined with boolean criteria, for what it is worth, eg:

  • "bondi beach" or "coogee beach" or even
  • ("bondi beach" or "coogee beach") not (tram or sand)

  There are still some constructs it doesn't handle, but it is getting close...

  Fixed the date handling in the Guided Search to accept dates such as 189?, 189*, 1891/3, 1891-3, 1891-93, 1891/93, 1891-1893, 200 BC -50 A.D., 19AD (yes, Norman Lindsay published a book in 19AD...)

Next Week

• More work on the static pages content and styling.

• More thesaurus conversion/mapping and user interface.

• Result formatting from simple and guided searches.

• Server patches to be applied Friday PM (probably).

• 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.

Links of the week

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade.
It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

• Pocket Monster How DoCoMo's wireless Internet service went from fad to phenom - and turned Japan into the first post-PC nation.

  There have been dozens of essays analysing the success of the Japanese i-mode and the failure of the competing American/European WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) mobile internet technologies, but none better than this. Apart from highlighting the crucial differences between "walled" and "weeded" gardens, it suggests that the success of i-mode is less to do with its cultural setting (as the WAP apologists like to proclaim), but more to do with its business model based on maximising use rather than on choking competition.