ALEG

What I've done

• Loaded the 277,140 AUSTLIT titles as works and expressions and (some) manifestations. As most of the AUSTLIT titles are not stand-alone work/expression/manifestations but appear as part-manifestations of other works (selected works, periodicals, etc), only 16,224 manifestations were created. However, this week I hope to use the AUSTLIT 'source' information to create all the part-manifestations. So far the ALEG database contains 1.2 million topics and 3.2 million topic relationships. Almost half the topics are "events" such as creation, realisation, embodiment, birth and death events.

  Loading the AUSTLIT titles took much longer than anticipated due to variations/unexpected contents in the data fields which kept crashing the load program. I finally made it more error-tolerant (ignoring the records in error rather than stopping) and cleaned up the errors manually before reloading them.

• The Oracle 8.1.6 CD's for Solaris finally arrived Friday morning, and Fran and installed this version of Oracle on the Library's Solaris server (almost finished) and loaded the ALEG database.

• Document how ALEG will handle some tricky cases - The "Poets of the Month" works from the mid 1970's and "Down the Lake with Half a Chook". These are amongst the most "difficult" cases Tessa and Kathy can come up with, so if we think the proposed data model can handle these, we'll be happy!

• Finishing getting Oracle 8.1.6 completely operational under Solaris.

• Create all the part manifestations by processing the AUSTLIT sources file to create/match compound works and expressions, deal with the periodical sources such as The Bulletin, The Age etc

  Fran will also be producing a file of the reviews, so we'll have to see how best to process them.

• A bit of a frustrating week with the data conversion taking so long and causing so many problems. On the positive side, with a lot of data loaded, sample prototype queries are still being executed quite quickly.