AustLit

What I've done

• As I've been working "part time" on AustLit, I've decided to move to fortnightly reports; not much seems to happen in a week now.

• Finally! Completed the client and server implementations of the "scope" maintenance function, with a demo for Kerry, Annette and Carol to consider. This will probably be discussed with the team at the forthcoming get-together. The types of relationships which should be scoped is still an open issue (although adding scopes to relationships is now a technically trivial task involving editting a schema).

  I still have to convert the subject-as-awards data to use this scope where the award-subject needs to be "scoped" to a year or year-range, and somehow add heuristics to the search function to identify years and use these as scope search expressions.

• Carol is keen to indicate ongoing editorship with a start date and a dash (eg 1998 - ). Change the stylesheet to omit an end date in a range when the end date is "2999". Hence, if a creation date of "1998-2999" is entered, it will render as " 1998 - " as required.

• Changed searches for "work as subject" to include works which reviewed the work.

• Revamped full text icon usage, driven by the current use of 2 different icons for SETIS and general links.

• A couple more followups on continuing issues regarding IP based authentication.

• A few changes to programs, stylesheets and other formatting following maintainer and user feedback (fix agent merge problem identified by Jane and corrected 37 work records which had "lost" agents due to this problem (well, they were still there, but invisible to the search algorithm); periodical issue wording changes; handover SETIS full text linking maintenance to Creagh/Vanessa; count by journal name of sources for our full text (scanned) images for Kerry; investigation of virus in mail sent to info-austlit (notified UOW); minor stylesheet changes; show worktype/form/genre of "works about" a work)

• The system was stable.

Next Fortnight

• Conversion of award-as-subject with years to use relationship scopes. Concurrently change search algorithms to use the scope for year searches associated with awards.

• Finalise AusWeb02 papers and presentations.

• 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

Links of the week

• FRBR and the revision of the Italian Author Cataloguing Rules (RICA) - Isa de Pinedo and Alberto Petrucciani, presentation to ELAG 2002Rome, 17-19 April 2002

  "The FRBR study introduced a neat distinction between entities of different types, the work, the expression and the manifestation.

  The distinction between the last two entities is based on a sharp division between the text (we would consider here, for sake of simplicity, only textual works) and the graphic form (font, page layout, etc.). However, this division is not as obvious or clear-cut as it may seems at first sight. Studies in book history had persuasively argued that the forms of the "typographical enunciation" have an influence on the message and so cannot be considered as extraneous to the meaning or intellectual content of a published work. Line divisions, emphasized passages or changes of typefaces may and usually do affect intellectual content: these may be slight changes, but not slighter than many changes between words, which are included – as we will see – in modifications giving origin to a new expression. In contemporary publishing, a book is very often "built up" in the publishing house, rather than merely formatted for printing, and almost always the text prepared by the author undergoes some changes, at least as regards style conventions."