ALEG

What I've done

• ALEG was cutover to the loan machine on Wednesday. The data load took just over 2 hours. Things worked OK with one exception, which was caused by some of the encoded HTTP parameters not being automatically decoded on some requests. This issue is very strange - on libadfa, some data HTTP 'POST' requests were decoded, some were not. The data is originally encoded by the browser where it contains characters which have a special meaning in the HTTP/HTML protocol headers. It must be decoded at the server before it is used. But on libadfa all POST data was being decoded when single values of a parameter were retrieved, and not when multiple values were being retrieved. On the loan machine, no automatic decoding was taking place. The version of the tomcat servlet was identical (same java bytecode), so the change must have been caused by us installing the latest version of the Java JVM for Solaris (1.3.0, versus 1.3.0 Release Candidate 1 on libadfa). A silly thing, but I wasn't expecting it and spent a lot of time tracking down non-causes!

  The new release of the JVM has not fixed a problem with the Java optimizer, which is disappointing. I've noticed that many other people have reported this same problem on the Sun bug-tracking database.

• Had a nasty fright when working with Tessa on the identification of series: about 40 works had incorrect alternate titles. This was tracked down to a problem in the TITLES file which was dumped from the AUSTLIT system. Somehow, about 30-50 titles had a corrupted title entry in the dumped file. These were nearly all alt titles of work-as-subject where the work did not exist as a title. I think I've manually corrected them all except one (which I'll discuss with Tessa on Monday).

• The bulk of the week was spent discussing the editting suite and refining the templates and screens and fixing bugs in readiness for the training next week. Selection/addition of topics from the current AUSTLIT topic set has been added to the work maintenance as an interim measure pending delivery of the final thesaurus. A large task was the optimization of updates, which has made updates to large works much faster. Another smaller specific task was the reworking of the agent stylesheet to show many of the new agent attributes.

  Wish we had another week....

• Data conversion - produced various reports and loaded various mass updates requested/produced by Ben and his team. The LAW data load is proving a big and time consuming job. Other areas of activity have been the cleanup of publishers (first 2 passes done and loaded), place names (in progress...) and identifing the new series groupings (author and publisher).

• Started building the user maintenance suite. Kerry and Annette will give this a thrash next Monday to add all the people attending the training.

• Review recent mail on work/expression/manifestation edit schema and apply final changes. Some changes to the Agent schema are also expected.
• Add general edits based on XSLT Schema (the Schematron approach).
• Add topic selection to the work/expression/manifestation UI (Marie-Louise, Kerry and Annette have produced a document containing suggested changes for me which I'm working through).
• Revisit output formatting (especially to show all the newly added attributes and relationships) and search screens.

• Maintain the "first known date" field for works automatically based on manifestation data of the work or containing works (started last week, but incomplete - also 'promote' expression and manifestation titles and agents to the work level to make searching on expression and manifestation titles much faster.

• Start coding the program to merge in the BAL data.

• Finalise changes (at least "finalise for the training") to the edit suite based on detailed feedback.

• Training and Partners' meeting

• Well, another week would be nice, but then so would another two weeks. Looking forward to the training and meeting all the AUSTLIT'ers from around Australia!

Links of the week

• Pat Schroeder's New Chapter : The Former Congresswoman Is Battling For America's Publishers - Linton Weeks

  ...Publishers and librarians are squaring off for a battle royal over the way electronic books and journals are lent out from libraries and over what constitutes fair use of written material.

  Grossly oversimplified: Publishers want to charge people to read material; librarians want to give it away.

  "We," says Schroeder, "have a very serious issue with librarians."

  With her squinting, smiling, you've-just-got-to-understand expression and her crinkly-caring voice, Schroeder is the publishing world's latest best hope. Her hair is silver. Her eyes are sparkly. The strap on her purse is short; she clutches it like an AK-47. She is a woman on a mission.