AustLit
Weekly Report - Week 49, 19 April 2002
What I've done
- Yet more followups on continuing issues regarding IP based authentication. Shared
proxies used by ISP's make IP based authentication problematic, and the
issues in each case can be time-consuming to address. More hidden costs of
not making things "public"!
- Added 2 new search attributes to the advanced search - agent role and
work creation role. The former selects agents who have ever used the
nominated roles (translator, illustrator etc), the latter selects works
which have been created (or expressions which have been embodied) using
the nominated roles. So, for example, you can find plays written in the 1970's
by women which have been translated (the plays, not the women), or Polish illustrators, ...
This was an interesting change and suprisingly, the first search we have on a "type of
relationship" (in this case, between the creation or embodiment event and the
creator).
- Added a new customer report summary which shows searches and page views
by customer type by month.
- Implemented a new report on external URL references stored in AustLit
which failed to be found by an automated link checker. Such a
process is subject to error because links may only be temporarily unavailable
and because some sites do not report "missing" pages with an HTTP 404 response,
but it may be better than nothing. The process is run weekly and the report
emailed to the info-austlit address.
- A small amount of progress on maintaining scope
information in the indexer's user interface. I only managed to spend a day
working on this, and I probably won't get much more done next week. Although
it is my main task at the moment, lots of other things keep jumping the queue.
- A few changes to stylesheets and other formatting following maintainer and
user feedback (display uncertain heritages and alt titles in brackets; minor font changes;
mass authorship change for Dan;help with the TEI-formatted doco and stylesheet changes for
Annette)
- The system was stable. The power supply was disconnected as advertised last Saturday,
and I shutdown and powered-off the machine at about 10:45am. As soon as power
was restored (about 12:50pm), I rebooted the machine, but it halted in the reboot
process with directory corruption on the "data" disk partition (where we currently
store our full text images). This was very suprising, but after repairing the
directory structure and rebooting, the system was fine. There was no permanent
unrecoverable damage. The system was available again at 1:15pm.
Next Week
- Continue design/implementation of relationship scopes. The first
use for this facility will be year-scoping of award-as-subject
relationships.
- Revamp full text icon usage, driven by the current use of 2 different
icons for SETIS and general links
Next few weeks
- Move awards to be event-based rather than work-based.
- Refining NBD Holdings searches.
- Review all subset definitions for efficacy.
- Import/export in MARC and DC formats.
- SDI facility.
- Combining searches
- System Documentation