ALEG

What I've done

• User-level thesaurus browser linked to work topic display.

• Changes to the data maintainers' thesaurus selector so that it shows recent similar selections when first opened.

• First pass at implementing subset searching.

• Subject searching, including work-as-subject and agent-as-subject. After much discussion we decided to implement keyword subject searching, automatically included synonyms and optionally include narrower terms. The keyword and synonym functions occassionaly produce non-intuitive results, but a soon to be added preface to the search results will explain exactly what subjects have been included and link to the thesaurus.

• Minor formatting changes and featured authors rotation added to the home page.

• Using a template devised by Megan, created about 300 finding aids encoded in EAD SGML format from Microsoft Word formatted documents. Some minor work is required to finalise.

• System:
  • Thanks to Geoff Colin at ITSC, the ADFA boundary router is now filtering network packets appropriately to limit unwanted probes on the AustLit machine
  • The Java Virtual Machine running the Tomcat web server (and AustLit application) hung on Thursday. This has happened once before. There is a problem description logged on the Sun Java bug database (bug id 4472904) which sounds very similar (and has lots of Me too! bug reports). Sun claim a fix has been coded, and I'd assume this will make it into the next release of Java (1.4)

Next Week

• Annette has compiled several large lists of changes to agent and work formatting which I'll work through

• Fine tune the searching of collection subsets of the database.

• Fine tune 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), finalise in-house finding aids.

• More work on the static pages content and styling.

• 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.

• Integrate free/simple and the maintainers search to use the "Guided Search" search engine.

• 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.