ALEG

What I've done

• More work on the results display. Reworked agent display to show works by and about an agent and reviews of an agent's work, grouped by work type/form/genre in 2 columns. Added multiple selection of work type/form/genre and reformatted display following feedback.

  Reworked work display to hide contents, reviews and criticisms if the number of each exceeds a threshold (10 - 15). Criticisms can now be selected individually for display (or all displayed).

• Worked on defining edit templates based on the type of work being created. Implemented some more speed optimisations to the edit script (reducing CPU by about 20% on works with many contained works). Added facility to show/hide reviews and contained works.

• Fran Cassidy has negotiated with Sun Microsystems to get us a loan machine due to the extended delay in the arrival of the ordered Sparc III system. This machine will have lots of memory and lots of processors, but each processor is about one third the speed of the processor in the ordered machine. However, it should perform adequately.

  The loan machine arrived on Thursday, but was "headless" (no console) and "handless" (no keyboard). Hopefully, we'll receive these early next week and start configuring it and then move ALEG from Libadfa (the Library's machine).

• Add more attributes to the work/expression/manifestation edit schema.
• Add general edits based on XSLT Schema (the Schematron approach).
• Add topic selection to the work/expression/manifestation UI (Marie-Louise, Kerry and Annette are producing a document next week containing suggested changes for me to work through).
• Think about user access control
• The maintenance suite does way-to-much unnecessary updating with works containing other works - investigate and fix.

• Discuss and iterate the search and display user interface

• Keep improving the maintenance user interface. High on the priority list is a ALEG staff "home page" which will be the starting point for searching and editing.

• The user interface is undergoing lots of refinement. We probably have about a week and a half to produce the version of the editting suite we'll be training with in late February.

Links of the week

• Web Sites Begin to Self Organize - By Katie Hafner, New York Times

  Most efforts at self-organization so far have been fairly simple, but effective. Several features on Amazon.com, like the list of authors with books similar to the one being viewed, take what could be a random database and develop relationships within it. The search site Google, which ranks a site depending on how many other sites have linked to it, is yet another example of self- organization at work.

  Sites for writers, like The Vines and others, are growing quickly, largely because of people's pent-up urge to pepper the world with their prose.