ALEG

What I've done

• Dataloading

  1. First pass of loading the Australian Responses to Asia bib. The goal was to add Asian geographic areas as minor subject references to works in Austlit. The bibliography is formatted as a Word document, which makes identification of the components of each entry a bit difficult. 1091 works were updated, 1076 already had the required subject, leaving 649 works which did not match. Some of these are new works to Austlit, but the vast majority are slight title/author mismatches or ambiguities. I've processed about a third of these manually and I'll discuss with Ben/Anne/Annette how to proceed.

  2. Loaded final of the Lu Rees bib after cleanup work by Ben.

• Cleanups

  1. The old Austlit system repeated a review for each work it reviewed. We've automatically attempted to merge these by matching on title (ignoring punctation, case, white space), agent name, periodical issue, page number. This reduced the number of reviews fromn around 50,000 to just under 40,000. There are doubtless duplicates with typos in title and name which must be merged manually.

  2. Expat and visitor status were removed from the ethnicity/nationality attributes.

  3. Subjective ranking values were changed

  4. Works of type anthology, selected work and collected work have had creator role changed to editor or author.

• Some more minor changes to formatting, templates, edit checks, bug fixes.

• Fran and a Sun engineer installed the new disk for the new machine last Friday (June 1). Unfortunately, the system software has a problem recognising the partitions on the disk at reboot. The engineer was unavailable last week but should be able to fix the problem this week.

  As well, the backup export problem reported last week has not been resolved, and we are going to install a later version of the Oracle software (8.1.7), which we've ordered from UNSW.

  Both problems will require reboots and downtime to resolve. For these reasons we've decided to postpone the cutover to the new machine until they are fixed, which hopefully will be next week.

• Finalise configuring and loading the new machine.

• Move the documentation web to the new machine.

• To Do list. Work through the (mostly) minor issues on the to-do list provided by Annette/Kerry/Marie-Louise.

• SA Women Writers Bib load.

• Day planning session on the new user interface with Marie-Louise and Annette.

• First known dates.

• The new thesaurus is expected to be available for loading soon.

• Pick up the ball I dropped regarding the Z39.50 interface to NLA holdings.