ALEG

What I've done

• Produced a worksheet with 690 AUSTLIT sources for which I can't reliably (automatically) find a matching AUSTLIT title. Marie-Louise and Annette are pondering how to tackle these. Many do have matches in AUSTLIT, but with variant titles, different authors (often pseudonyms), but many don't - they are non AUSTLIT works or just aren't on AUSTLIT as titles.

• Created ALEG periodical works for periodical names garnered from the AUSTLIT sources without authors, which are mostly periodicals. Prior to creating these, I (very cautiously!) cleaned up obvious misspellings and produced consistent periodical name stems (merging "The Sydney Morning Herald" and "Sydney Morning Herald, The") and grouping periodical supplements and sections under the periodical work (so, for example, the SMH "Good Living" supplement is not a separate periodical, but will be a separate expression of the SMH on a particular date).

  Some of the AUSTLIT sources without works were obviously not periodicals, just AUSTLIT works for which the author was not given in the source reference. I added these to the list of 690 mentioned above.

• Applied the non-periodical source information to create 123,294 links from expressions to manifestations. These are typically verses appearing in anthologies, selected works, etc. About 600 non-periodical sources could not be linked. 80% of these seem to be because The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse mysteriously doesn't have a title record with publication details in AUSTLIT (easily fixed) - I'll look at the others in detail next week.

• A minor panic when a few thousand sources could not be matched with extracted sources from AUSTLIT, but it turned out the dump from AUSTLIT contained a bunch of experimental records created to test the use of separate Review records in AUSTLIT. These will be easy to find and remove from ALEG.

• 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!

• Cleanup the 'sources without manifestations' problem mentioned above and other minor formatting errors in some of the AUSTLIT sources.

• Construct expression and manifestation records for periodical issues referenced in sources and create the links from expressions to these manifestations, completing the creation of source information and links (apart from the recalcitrants which will be handled manually).

• Reviews (which I've mentioned in the last few weeks' reports) won't be created any time soon by Fran - apparently the creation of reviews will be distruptive to the AUSTLIT database, so either we have to wait until closer to the cutover or think of another appproach.

• Hopefully, start creating the online web based maintenance infrastructure.

• I think the big issues with sources have now been tackled (or placed into the 'too hard - need to be fixed manually basket').