ALEG

What I've done

• More tuning of the advanced search interface and query engine.

• Links to searches of the "RAAM" and "Guide to Australian Literary Manuscripts" literary archives have been created from agent detail display pages.

• Programs written to help identify and correct the problems caused by ambiguous place names. Ben has started work comparing the LAW records of birth/death places with the AustLit database, and will start on the general problem next week.

• Design work on the customer accounting and user database has been completed.

• The system has been stable this week.

• The Canberra AustLit team and ADFA Special Collections enjoyed a lovely Christmas Lunch on Wednesday organised by Lesley Banson, which also doubled as an opportunity to wish Annette Scarvell all the best for her 10 week holiday in Thailand.

• Today (30 November 2001) was Fran Cassidy's last day as the ADFA Library's system programmer. Fran is retiring to build an environmentally friendly house on 70 acres south of Canberra.

  Fran was the developer of many of the library's systems, including the previous incarnation of AustLit. She was also a tremendous help on this project with great background knowledge, speedy extraction of the data from the old system and setup and management of the AustLit server. Her calmness, patience and skills will be greatly missed!

Next Week

• More tasks from Kerry and Annette's list.

• Off site backup procedures.

• Implement customer accounting and new user identification functions.

• Discuss full text issues with Marie-Louise.

• Load some of the full text 'images' from the CD's in the brown box to assess the scope of the problem linking them to works.

• 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.

• Search usage analysis.

• Combining searches

Random statistic of the week

• The good news: since Google crawled AustLit and added us to their index 2 weeks ago, we've had just over 1,000 'referrals' from the Google search engines. The bad news: the single most popular search term used by Google searchers to find AustLit was kerry marie (used 180 times), which appears to have little to do with Australian Literature...

• MIT Begins Effort to Create Public Web Pages for More Than 2,000 Courses - Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education

  The project, which is expected to cost as much as $100-million over 10 years, aims to publish Web pages for more than 2,000 courses.

  Related links:

  MIT to make nearly all course materials available free on the World Wide Web

  Unprecedented step challenges 'privatization of knowledge'
  ... "OpenCourseWare is not exactly what I had expected. It is not what many people may have expected. But it is typical of our faculty to come up with something as bold and innovative as this, " President Vest commented.

  MIT OpenCourseWare

  At a press conference on April 4, 2001, MIT announced its commitment to make the materials from virtually all of its courses freely available on the World Wide Web for non-commercial use. This new initiative, called MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), reflects MIT's institutional commitment to disseminate knowledge across the globe.