AustLit

What I've done

• After some more discussions about public access, the implementation has been completed. There will probably be some fine-tuning to come, but basically public access is available to:
  • thesaurus browse and information pages (as before)
  • recent additions list (although the information presented is severely pruned)
  • "On This Day" agents
  • About 1500 agents in a public browse list

  All agent details are shown except for:

  • biography is trunctated to 500 characters
  • awards

  and no work details can be retrieved.

  Sample pages are now available, and the "access denied" error page has been changed to point to the new publically available information.

• Added a function for maintainers to list agents born/died on a specific date after a request from Dan that this would assist making sure these agent details are reviewed before their "big day".

• Discussions with Kerry about future directions, as part of the planning for the next grant application.

• A few minor changes to stylesheets and other formatting following maintainer and user feedback (Wording on hyperlink to PANDORA; removed new work-form "painting", added new expression-form "painting"; fixed problem where private manifestation level edition info was being shown; changed "column" template to remove manifestation details)

• Something happened to my PC over the (Canberra-day long) weekend and the upshot is my setup and all my email was flushed; Year 0. I can't remember having any outstanding emails last Friday, but if I haven't reponded to your email, please forgive me and resend it.

• The system was stable (uptime now 134 days)

Next Week

• Continue design/implementation of relationship scopes. The first use for this facility will be year-scoping of award-as-subject relationships.

• Move awards to be event-based rather than work-based.

• 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.

• Review all subset definitions for efficacy.

• Import/export in MARC and DC formats.

• SDI facility.

• Combining searches

• System Documentation

Links of the week (mainly thanks to AgentWeb's AgentNews)

• Data mining MARC to find: FRBR? - Knut Hegna, University of Oslo and Eeva Murtomaa, Helsinki University

  "Many years will pass before cataloguing rules and machine readable formats will support the FRBR model. The questions we asked ourselves were: what can we do in the meantime with the records based on the ISBDs, AACR2 and MARC 4 ? To what extent could we extract some of the entities and some of the relations of the FRBR model from the MARC records of our national bibliographies?"

• Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia - Cory Doctorow

  "There are at least seven insurmountable obstacles between the world as we know it and meta-utopia. I'll enumerate them below:"

• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Panopticon - Cory Doctorow

  "AltaVista tried to get computers to do both the repetitive parts (capturing billions of documents) and the creative parts (figuring out what the documents are about). This yielded the largest collection of randomly organized documents in the world, a Web-accessible version of a library where all the books have been re-shelved by axe-grinding illiterates who wanted to make sure that no matter what you were looking for, you'd find porn."

• Seeing Around Corners - Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic

  "The new science of artificial societies suggests that real ones are both more predictable and more surprising than we thought. Growing long-vanished civilizations and modern-day genocides on computers will probably never enable us to foresee the future in detail—but we might learn to anticipate the kinds of events that lie ahead, and where to look for interventions that might work."

  Strangely, this article doesn't mention "Conway's Game of Life", which demonstrates some extraordinary effects with completely trivial rules.

• The broadband non-crisis - David Walker

  "Everyone's worried about Australia's low broadband penetration. Are Australia's consumers deluded? Does the country's regulatory regime allow broadband to be overpriced? Or is this just a solution looking for a problem?"