ALEG

What I've done

• Built a prototype maintainers home page for review. The aim for this page is to allow rapid searching and selection for editting or add a new work according to a chosen template.

• Loaded the place names from the LAW and BAL files, integrating them into the current place name hierarchy by "normalising" them as much as possible (eg "Syd" -> Sydney, NSW, Australia, "Paris" -> "Paris, France", "St.Lucia" and "St Lucia" -> "St Lucia, Brisbane, Qld", etc).

• Loaded the LAW data matched already matched to the ALEG authors - I think this is about half of the LAW entries. Ben + team are almost finished the rest, so this will be loaded early next week

• Minor changes to edit screens and output formatting. Marie-Louise, Kerry, Annette and Tessa have completed their review of the edit screens and I'll start implementing these early next week.

• The Sun loan machine arrived, and most of the week was spent with Fran building it from scratch. This is almost done - a copy of the database is being loaded as I type (Friday 5pm). It has been a bit frustrating because we don't have a graphical console on this loan machine, and we're installing the latest Sun operating system which is different enough from the current one in use at the library to require us to think, read, experiment more than we'd like!

  Anyway, nearly done. Early in the week we were told that the machine which ANU had ordered (which is the same as our ordered machine) had been delivered. Unfortunately, the brief hope that ours might also be sitting on a loading dock somewhere in Australia was snuffed out when we were told the expected delivery date was now 31 March!

• 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.

• Load the rest of the LAW data, start coding the program to merge in the BAL data.

• Implement changes to the edit suite based on detailed feedback.

• Get the new machine bedded in ,tested and cut the ALEG software over mid-week.

• It was good to load at least half the LAW data. Glad the setup of the loan machine is almost over...

Links of the week

• The Power of Metadata - Rael Dornfest and Dan Brickley

  "This essay is an excerpt from the forthcoming book Peer-to-Peer Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies. It presents the goals that drive the developers of the best-known peer-to-peer systems, the problems they've faced, and the technical solutions they've found"

• Effective Web Writing - Crawford Kilian

  "Once you understand the people for whom you've designed your site, your text should reflect three basic principles of Web writing: orientation, information, and action."