I was absent minded the last couple weeks, and completely forgot
to update my bLog. Looking back through my e-mail it looks like
I spent most of my time on a few things.
First, I helped Clint implement a few
vufind patches
before he kicked off a new full copy from voyager to vufind.
On Thursday 08/26 Aaron, Bonnie, Midge, and I met with Drew and Iryana
from the
assessment office
to further discuss their plans to implement
digital measures
to standardize the faculty annual review and assessment process.
Auburn University will require her faculty to
submit material for annual review to our digital measures server
from which department heads, deans, and university management
may generate reports and metrics for teaching and research performance
for individual faculty on up to the university level.
At the meeting we discussed how assessment's digital measures project
might dovetail with the library's nascent plans to implement an
institutional repository through which faculty may publish
research artifacts for
open access by the general public.
It turns out that the university's new guidelines for university funded
research requests that faculty make their funded research available
for open access either through Auburn's own "scholarly repository"
(which the library supposedly is developing) or some other online repository.
Anyway, the digital measures project and the open access clause in the funding
guidelines have combined to make Bonnie and Aaron very excited
that the library quickly establish a repository for faculty research.
Some library staff will join Drew and Iryana's group of digital measures
beta testers, and I'll setup some collections in our
DSpace server on
repo that will be ready
to accept faculty research papers.
Although I spent a lot of words describing the digital measures
effort above, I actually spent much more time over the last two
weeks on the tool to marry Claudine's scans of
ACES documents
with the appropriate MARC records in Voyager from which she wants to pull
metadata. Each metadata file from the scanner
specifies a title that includes series information like,
"Bulletin No. 5 of the Alabama Soils Bla bla: Peanut Performance in Alabama"
while the matching MARC record stores the "Peanut Performance in Alabama"
part as a title, and stores the series information in other parts of the
MARC record. Anyway, from the start I should have just used
Lucene or tapped into
the Sorl server
that backs our Vufind
install at http://catalog.lib.auburn.edu,
but I thought I already had the set of 1200 or so MARC records
to draw from, so I wound up implementing my own simple
title-search algorithm.
Everything looked good for my set of 4 test records, but
when I ran a sanity check against the full set of over 1000 scans,
it turned out that many of the MARC records I had pulled based
on an earlier exchange with Claudine were not needed, and many
needed MARC records were missing.
I eventually collected a larger set of MARC records to draw from,
but the amount of data that I'm working with now is large enough
that my simple title-searcher takes a long time to run over the
full record set.
Next week I'll run some more tests over a subset of the data,
then run the full data set into a Google docs
spread sheet, and ask Claudine to go through the title matches,
and manually correct the MARC bib-id's for titles that the code
does not correctly match. Once we have that spread sheet, I'll
feed it to the code I have to generate the dublin core for import into d-space.
Anyway - the code is cool and fun, but it's freaking frustrating to
trip over so many problems for this stupid little project that could
have been done by hand by now.
Finally, I made some good progress on the minnows morphology database
project we're working on with
Professor Jon Ambruster
in biology.
I read over an introduction
to "geometric morphometrics", and
I think I came up with a good way of tricking our
Minnows DSpace server
to store morphometric data in a dublin core field attached to
an item record for a minnow sample's reference photograph.
We'll see what Jon thinks next week.
