ALEG
Weekly Report - Week 9, 29 June 2001
What I've done
- Dataloading
- SA Women Bib: Loaded plays - about 270 of these were new, about 100 were
existing and just updated in ALEG. Loaded books - 890 of these were
new, about 740 were existing and just updated in ALEG. Partially loaded
Anthologies, which are proving more difficult to match, as I'd expected
almost all to be already in ALEG. So far, about 470 have been matched
with nearly 400 to go. When this is done, processing of the "minor publications"
(mostly poetry, short stories) can begin!
- Miscellaneous queries and adhoc data analysis reports, mainly
associated with 11,000+ works without worktype/form/genre classification.
- Removed manuscript as a work form type; converted existing records to have
an "is manuscript" assertion at the manifestation level.
- With Marie-Louise, ran a few dozen unusual queries to extract statistics
of journal publication since 1939... you'll have to wait for Marie-Louise's
paper to be astonished at the results!
- System
The system spontaneously rebooted on Tuesday afternoon. No data was lost,
but this was a disturbing event and the first unscheduled interruption
the ALEG system has had since it started running in January.
Fran contacted Sun, sent them the general machine configuration (no crash
dump was produced), and they responded with 480 megabytes of patches to
apply. Getting and organising the patches was delayed by their size
and number, but we finally applied them lunchtime Friday. Unfortunately,
the process was very slow and the syste was unavailable from 12:30 until
2:50 pm, way beyond our estimate of 1 hour.
Unfortunately (again), not all the patches applied because of incompatabilities
in the set of patches (some pre-requisite patches were not supplied by Sun;
some patches conflicted with other patches and were hence mutually exclusive),
and Fran has contacted Sun about these.
Otherwise, tuning of the system has been ongoing to maximise memory
utilisation, and it seems to be going well.
Next Week
- To Do list. Work through the (mostly) minor issues on the to-do
list provided by Annette/Kerry/Marie-Louise.
- Finalise SA Women Writers Bib load - continue with the anthology and minor publication data
- More time on planning session on the new user interface with Marie-Louise
and Annette.
- Some reports for Kerry and Annette on works without meaningfull
type/form/genre classification - these came from BAL/AMLC/WABIB
with designations such as "fiction" or "sundry", and we need
to work out how best to tackle their classification.
Next few weeks
- First known dates.
- The new thesaurus is expected to be available for loading soon -
I'm going to have to revise the hierarchy structures to allow
topic searches to include words from across the thesaurus "tree".
- Pick up the ball I dropped regarding the Z39.50 interface to NLA
holdings.
Links of the week