ALEG

What I've done

• Moved difficult, unmapped old thesaurus terms to various "ghettos" within the new thesaurus. Updated all the topic relationships to use the new thesaurus subjects, updated the Maintenance Interface schema and the stylesheets to use these new subjects, mapped the new thesaurus date subjects to date ranges (and disabled the thesaurus date subjects). So, finally, the new thesaurus is in use.

• A new home page design has been implemented.

• Implemented a mechanism to age the connection objects used to communicate between the Java server programs and the Oracle database. After the Java server has been running for several hours under load, I've noticed the memory consumed increases, which I suspected was due to either a large number of SQL commands being remembered by the connection object or a memory leak (sorry, Java doesn't have those - the required euphemism is "Unintended Object Retention"). Now connections are retired after a defined number of SQL commands or when they reach a defined age. So far, this seems to have helped reduce memory use and paging.

Next Week

• Implement the searching of collection subsets of the database.

• Implement subject searching on the new thesaurus subjects.

• Implement Keyword anywhere searching.

• Revise EAD production for Lu Rees Finding Aids (following changes devised by Megan and Marlene).

• More work on the static pages content and styling.

• Change the thesaurus selection interface to remember the last selected subjects.

• Implement an end-user thesaurus browser.

• 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.

• More 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.

Links of the week

• How credible is this? - The Stanford Web Credibility Project.

  Our goal is to understand what leads people to believe what they find on the Web. We hope this knowledge will enhance Web site design and promote future research on Web credibility.

• Counterpane Cryto-Gram 30 Sept 2001 - a special issue by Bruce Schneier discussing some of the implications of the September 11 attacks.

  Rarely do you see an attack that changes the world's conception of attack, as these terrorist attacks changed the world's conception of what a terrorist attack can do. Nothing they did was novel, yet the attack was completely new. And our conception of defense must change as well...

  Airline security measures [introduced as a response] are primarily designed to give the appearance of good security rather than the actuality. This makes sense, once you realize that the airlines' goal isn't so much to make the planes hard to hijack, as to make the passengers willing to fly.

• Lose the Charisma - "extolling the vast transformational power of the really dull executive".

  Charisma is a liability -- something to be overcome, like a speech impediment. Executive compensation and company performance are not linked. And -- brace yourself -- technology has nearly zilch to do with sparking a company's transformation from run-of-the-mill to top-of-the-hill