ALEG
Weekly Report - Week 25, 19 October 2001
What I've done
- Most of the week was spent making changes to the stylesheets with dozens
of changes. Some were minor, others required programming further "back" in the
system to add newly required data to the XML which is passed to the stylesheets.
This task is progressing, but involves much experimentation to see what
things look like, and requires much consultation to to fine tune.
Unfortunately, adding more info to the summary results (first publication
details) does require more processing, so some searches and work summary results will
take longer.
We're only testing the formatting with Internet Explorer. When we are happy
with the formatting, we'll then attempt to make it work acceptably under
Netscape. Although Netscape's market share is dropping to irrelevant
levels (Microsoft's Share
Of Browser Market Continues To Rise: Now More Than 87%,
Netscape used by 5.6% of some
sample of users),
it is still overrepresented in academic circles, so we have
to make it work at least a bit!
- Integration of free/simple and guided searches, minor changes to
guided search operation.
- Pass #2 at the EAD formatting for the Special Collections finding aids - seems
to be all fine now - thanks Megan!
- System:
- The machine spontaneously rebooted just after 10am on Friday. No cause
apparent in any of the logs, so this will be passed to Sun to investigate!
- The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) running the Tomcat web server (and AustLit application)
continued to hang every day or two. In desparation, I added an undocumented
and unexplained parameter to the JVM command line which reportedly (Sun Java bug database,
bug id 4472904) sometimes helps. We'll see. As in this reported bug, the
"SIQQUIT" signal is ignored by the JVM, so this seems like a serious problem
in the JVM. Sun also released an updated version
on the JVM, but it is a very minor update, and the release notes say that the
sole reason for the update was to fix a problem running the JVM within an
Interent Explorer window, which is irrelevant to us!
- Merja, Lee and Megan all left the project this week. Merja and Lee
did great work on the cleanup task, and Megan was behind the fantastic
online documentation.
Next Week
- Rendering changes.
- Setup for public access - mainly remove read-only access restrictions
whilst maintaining update restrictions.
- Implement Keyword anywhere searching.
- Revise EAD production for Lu Rees Finding Aids (following changes devised by
Megan and Marlene).
- 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.
- Drop execution priority of long-running queries so that new short queries are given
preference when the machine is very busy.
Next few weeks
- 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. (And Joan
noticed Aberdeen NSW -v- Aberdeen Scotland!)