AustLit

What I've done

• Added function to support specification and mass extract of records into an XML formatted file.

• More work on sorting - added a "re-sort" function at the top of search result pages which allow results to be re-sorted before all query results are returned. This required (for the first time) the system to 'remember' queries so that they can be re-issued with a different sort criteria.

• Added functions to review facility to help thesaurus maintenance, and function to generate a weekly email of new thesaurus terms and thesaurus terms pending approval (I need to talk to Kerry, Marie-Louise and Annette before this is activated). Spending some time with Annette discussing this facility reaffirmed our understanding that the thesaurus management issue is very complex and important, but most of the issues are subject-matter not technical.

• Substantial email discussions on Kinetica holdings searches and immutable numbers. I've been thinking about attempting to use immutable numbers to 'paper over' fundamental differences in the underlying models (FRBR and MARC), and I don't think the prospects are good, but hopefully this will be something we talk about with Kerry next week and then discuss in detail with the NLA.

• Misc minor changes to stylesheets and other formatting following maintainer and user feedback (show manifestation printer, 'non-austlit' people to maintainers, rejig simple search prompt, allow single result to be selected for reformatting

• Ongoing discussion and planning for the next group of development tasks.

• The system was stable. 'Uptime' is now 100 days.

  Java 1.4.0 has been officially released. We might wait a few weeks for the dust to settle before installing it. The release documentation suggest signficant performance and stability improvements in this release of the JVM.

  Next Wednesday will be the 1st birthday of the new AustLit. Well, as good a date as any as a birthday is 20th Februrary 2001, the 'coming out' day, the first day of the new system training.

Next Week

• Planning sessions with Kerry, Annette, Marie-Louise (!! Marie-Louise's final week on the project !!)

• Design/implement "public view" processing.

• 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.

• Restructure awards to include year as an award attribute and move awards to be event-based rather than work-based.

• Review all subset definitions for efficacy.

• Import/export in MARC and DC formats.

• SDI facility.

• Combining searches

• System Documentation