Depts

I've gone through SR's spec document for the form he wants to create to gather metadata from the authors of the articles in his encyclopedia. Quick and dirty would be SurveyMonkey, but it's not really set up to allow the user to add additional elements to the survey form. (e.g. name major works associated with artistic movement X and rate that work's importance outside the movement). I'm not sure he'll be willing to compromise the look and feel of the form to the degree I think will be required by SurveyMonkey.
Also created a very small ajax site that does allow the user to add elements to the form, and then processes the values of those elements to generate strings that go into an SQL db. Major concern is what to use as delimiters within those text strings. E.G. if the field in the DB is called Question1 and there are an arbitrary number of fields in the form whose values I must concatenate to produce the string that goes into Question1, what do I use to delimit each of those values from the form field? We're only using the SQL db as a temporary repository, so I don't really want to go to the bother of creating a full-on set of relational tables and all the code to modify then properly.

Met with AC and worked out details of the phase-1 enhancements agreed by the HCMC Committee:

Adaptive DB enhancements and data reorganization:

• Allow searching on an integer field (such as id) using a comma-separated list of values.
• Add a popup-help button to text fields.
• Create a feature that can generate an automated script that uses curl or wget to check the accuracy of links inside links fields.
• Hive off illustrations into a separate table, move the data over there, add some extra fields. I'm still discussing this with AC -- it's not clear how much information needs to be stored with an illustration, or how to handle illustrators -- but for the moment, RAs will stop entering illustration info (they've been inserting titles into the links field so far, which makes for broken links, so we'd like to minimize that).

Search interface enhancements:

• Retrieve page-image links and show them using a generic page icon that's clickable to show the image.
• (Eventually, after reorganization of illustration data): add linked illustration search, search by illustrator, etc. Perhaps this will require a separate search page, since people may want to search the illustrations independently of the poem data.

Added the list of new lectures scheduled for this year, and tweaked the committee list, per JS-R.