ALEG

What I've done

• Advanced Search has been evolved following feedback, linked to the Search page and documented with examples of use.

• Some more tuning of the query generator - seems much improved over typical searches arising from the Advanced Search interface (well, fewer queries are now timed out, some run much quicker, nothing seems worse...).

• A facility to merge two thesaurus topics have been developed. I tested it by merging about 100 spatial topics from the "Unassigned" category to matching topics existing outside the "Unassigned" area.

• 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!)

  I've started analysing the problem, but the first attempt at producing suspect assignments was scuppered by an inordinate number of duplicate place names. Some of these have been partially corrected by the above mentioned topic merge, but many are due to there being, for example, two "Melbourne"'s in the thesaurus (one being "greater Melbourne", the other being "Melbourne CBD or city"). We probably need to distinguish these, but I need help making this decision!

• The system has been stable this week. Anne (Flinders) and Terry (Monash) had intermittent problems adding new topics when editing topics, but these *may* have been caused by local problems. The problems seemed to be cleared by restarting their machines. We had a few network outages here at ADFA midweek, which may have contributed to the problems, it is hard to tell.

Next Week

• More tasks from Kerry and Annette's list.

• Attacking the bogus place assignment - Kerry suggested using the LAW conversion notes (for birth/death place), which was a good idea which I'll develop.

• Manuscript holdings searches against RAAM and Guide to Literary Manuscripts.

• Off site backup procedures.

• ADFA AustLit team Christmas lunch!

• 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.

• Refining NBD Holdings searches.

• Subscriber database and public/subscriber access control.

• Combining searches