AustLit
Fortnightly Report - Week 54 and 55, 31 May 2002
What I've done
- Very little further progress on implementing the scoped search or
converting the works with awards-as-subjects and dates to use
scoped awards as subjects. Some discussion amongst the team on how
searching should actually work (ie, are the attributes of the "scope"
automatically attributes of the work? - If a work has an spatial
topic of "Canberra", but that relationship is scoped by the years
"1990's", then should the work be returned when searching just
for the temporal topic "1990's"?).
- Produced function to extract data for the forthcoming BAL "F-K"
bibliography. Needs a bit of work, but the basics are sound and
should help the production of this bibliography by extracting a great
deal of the information from AustLit.
- Added a new step-by-step guide
to using Advanced Search following user feedback indicating that more
explanation was needed
- The NLA have moved their images from the "Images 1" database to
the "Pictures Catalogue", and consequently the images have new
persistent identifers (hmmm..). Because the NLA are temporarily
redirecting old Images 1 requests to the new service, Tony Boston (NLA) advised I
use the HTTP redirect output to discover the new ids for each image,
which I did. I also changed the stylesheet to generate URL's to
the new service.
- Added some DC metadata tags to the "static" pages, generated using
existing metadata contained in the XML used to markup these pages.
- Fixed a bug discovered by Susan Cowan in the resorting option.
If you ran a guided search with a sort order, then
did a "show all" with the same sort order, then the
"show all" result was not sorted according to
the sort order, but was shown in the default sort
order. If a different sort order was chosen as part
of the "show all", it would be sorted correctly - the
problem only occured when the sort order was not
changed between the summary and full display.
Susan also noticed that on a Mac under IE5, the search results
are sometimes incorrectly numbered! Navigator under a Mac is
OK, so there looks to be a problem with IE5 on the Mac generating
the numbers for ordered lists, sometimes!! I verified that the
HTML we are generating is "OK" (ie, properly nested, valid).
- Tessa spotted a problem caused when an editor of a periodical
was defined at a periodical expression level. Although this was
itself an error (it wouldn't be done), the system didn't cope with
it, and thought the thing the author was an editor of MUST have been
a work, not an expression. I tried a quick fix, but unfortunately
this involved adding a clause to the SQL generator's output, which
made the Oracle query optimizer go for a Burton (or for a Tosca; it went
a very long way-away anyway). The "right" fix is now in place.
- More discussion on pseuds and searching. The (temporary?) upshot is
that the search results page now checks whether you searched on
agent attributes for works, and if you did AND at least one of the
agent attributes was not gender (but was, say, heritage or name)
it shows a list of agents which satisfied the agent part of the search.
The idea is that you may be searching for a work written by a pseud of
the agent you think you are looking for - now at least you can scan the
list of names and perhaps spot the "real" agent which has produced
the work.
- Produced some screen snap shots to accompany Marie-Louise's paper -
may need more..
- A few changes to programs, stylesheets and other formatting following maintainer and
user feedback (external URL rendering; particularly notable was removal of many of the smaller font
renderings such as first line of verse, as apparently people find it too
difficult to read; the balance in favour of discriminating semantically
different text and readability at all user font sizes has tipped in favour
of the latter)
- 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.
- Think about preparing AusWeb02 presentations.
Next few months
- 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