ALEG

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.

• 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!)