AustLit

What I've done

• More user accounting implementation - counts of access by user/year/month to authors and works are now recorded.

• The first cut at customer reports has been implemented and reviewed by some local librarians who deal with similar information from other electronic services. The formats are closed to finalised - my main job now is to produce the comma-delimited format for customers who which to analyse/graph their data further.

• The new customer/group/user maintenance suite has been modified following some early feedback from Marie-Louise, but more changes are pending and more feedback is expected early next week.

  We are anticipating cutting over to subscription access at the end of next week, but we still have to finalise exactly what will be public and how it will be rendered to non-subscribers.

• A few changes to the search algorithms and SQL generation logic were made after the search report revealed several queries unexpectedly failing. The problems were incorrect construction of the search when some particular scopes were selected and no work-level attributes were selected. There was also a problem in the subject searching logic when 3 or more search terms were used, the last of which was a date (eg Miles Franklin 2001).

  A change was made to the thesaurus maintenance to count all uses of a term, not just the count of uses as a "subject".

• We started a discussion about the appropriateness of linking awards to works rather than to creation or embodiment roles. I strongly suspect that awards should be linked to roles, as that would allow us to appropriately represent an award to an illustrator for their contribution to an expression. In hindsight I wished I'd spent more time thinking about awards!

• The system was stable whilst the chief destabilizer (me) was absent. There were 4 very brief outages this week as I fiddled with changes to the user and accounting sub-system.

Next Week

• Finalise implemention of customer accounting: comma delimted formatting.

• Implementation of numerous changes to customer/group/user maintenance from Marie-Louise's and Kerry's feedback.

• Design/implement "public view" processing in preparation for...

• Cutover to subscriber access

• Change current "text" format of works to something friendlier for importing into citation managers - discussions start next week.

• Program to help linking of full text images 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.

• Combining searches

Link of the week

• Easy Topic Maps

  It's not easy making a topic map, not because they are so hard, but because not many good TopicmapTutorials are available. This page aims to be one.

  Great! And just in time according to this end of year commentary in XML.COM:

  You'd be forgiven for hoping that since the cessation of internecine conflict in the Topic Maps world, interested users might get a rest from the advocacy and have a chance to figure out what topic maps have to offer. No such luck. Newly reunited, the TM folk seemed at XML 2001 to have reopened hostilities with the RDF world. For what feels like an age, we've been hearing that the TM and RDF folk just have to figure out what the relationship is between their two technologies...