2010/07/13-15 - ACES Voyager merge pain

I've been working on the tool to decorate the dublin-core for each pdf in the ACES scanning project with metadata from our Voyager catalog. I've got code running that extracts each record's metadata from the mets files the scanning contractor delivered, and also have the list of Voyager ids, so now I need a strategy to match A with B, and glue it all together.

I'm making the best of this ACES project by taking the opportunity to update some shared code and trying some new things, but I believe that the index of the pdf's full-text makes the meta-data from the catalog superfluous for discovery - especially after Google and Bing scan our sever. The librarians refuse to believe that though!

2010/07/08,12 - Honors Theses are Go!

I think the new repo server is nearly ready to start accepting Honors College theses this fall. I updated the site to include links to Midge's final liability release form; submitted a couple test records; spoke with Tony about the web design; sent the following e-mail to Kathie at the Honors College, and finally submitted a purchase order for a new SSL certificate for the server. Tony had the good idea to setup a rule that routes http://repo.lib.auburn.edu/honors/ to the collection too.

--- Reuben Pasquini 7/8/2010 4:58 PM ---
Hi Kathie!

I just want to give you an update on the 
online collection for honors theses.
I think we're on track for a fall release.

*. The attached Word document has the final legal
    disclaimer approved by the lawyers.
    The form is also online:
        http://repo.lib.auburn.edu/HonorsLiabilityForm.pdf 
    and
        http://repo.lib.auburn.edu/HonorsLiabilityForm.doc 
   Let us know if you have questions or see problems.
    
*. The theses collection is at:
         http://repo.lib.auburn.edu/honors/ 
    You can add that link to the Honors College web site
    once we go live.
    We'll remove the 2 test records before then.

*. The library web designer, Tony Oravet, plans to update the
    site design in the next month.
    Please let us know if you have any requests.

*. I'll be out of town July 19 until August 9.
    Can we plan to meet sometime the week of August 9
    to review the site, and to give you some training
    on how to add a student to the system, and how
    to review a student's submission ?
    Monday to Thursday 
    starting 9:30am to 2:00pm is best for me ...

I think that's all I wanted to report.
What do you think ?

Cheers,
Reuben

2010/07/06-07 - vufind redux

I spent most of my time the last couple days patching a couple search related bugs that pop up in corner cases - one with "author" search and another with very long search strings. I think the patches are ok, but there's no regression test suite, so we'll see.

I need to get back to work on the AU-repo ACES import and configuration for the Honors College collection. I made a few small changes yesterday, but I'll do more tomorrow.

06/29-30,07/01/2010 - respect cataloging!

Over the last few days I managed to stage Claudine's ACES collection scans on our server, configure an XSL transform to translate each scan's title, author, date metadata file to the format Dspace wants for bulk import. I imported some records into a test collection , and sent an e-mail out to let several people take a look. The librarians want to enrich the Dspace records with metadata from our Voyager catalog. For example, this Dspace record corresponds to this Voyager record. I pointed out that the DSpace server indexes the OCR full-text of each record's PDF content, so the extra metadata won't help much with discovery. Librarians don't like it when you say things like that!

I spent most of Thursday preparing a patch that fixed a bug Julie at the graduate school found in the ETD proquest-export tool.

2010/06/24,28 - repository work

The last couple days at the library involved work on a couple repository collections. I spent most of Thursday installing DSpace on our "minnows" server. Today Claudine brought a USB-drive to my desk full of the scans of her ACES collection. I began copying the data onto my workstation, and dug up the information on how to batch-import the pdf's and metadata into our repository.

2010/06/21-23 - time for fish

Over the last few days I finished up the AuCataloging port to the new bootstrap code, split clickTracker, catRequest, and refStats code each out to its own build project, and released a new vufind tool that includes "id-file" support. I'm having fun working on the AuCataloging code, but I'll have to pull myself away tomorrow to install d-space on the minnows-project test server running in a VM on Clint's machine.

2010/06/14-16 - back to zero

I've spent most of my time the last few days porting the AuCataloging code base up to the new littleware 2.1 module system. I've finally finished all the individual tools for ETD and VuFind, but I still need to update the AuCataloging webapp. Hopefully that won't be too painful.

Once I get everything back to zero, then I'll go back and add the "read bib-ids from a file" functionality to the Vufind import tool, and also take a look at extending the data-model to save form values to persistent files, so an application starts up with configuration values saved during its last execution.