Colonial Despatches

1309 page images for CO 60 Vol 13 (in three different sizes) have been added to the collection. These cover the British Columbia 1862: Despatches to London. These will now be linked into the transcription documents.

Added him to the coldesp group so he can upload maps while I'm away. Reminder to self: unsigned jars bug is caused by using OpenJDK 1.6; switch to 1.7 to avoid. This is a per-user setting on the machine.

Collected stats for the first quarter of 2013.

Old URLs for www.tapor.uvic.ca were being used to call on resources on the home1t filesystem; I've now switched all of those to hcmc.uvic.ca. This should also be done for other projects such as Mariage.

Finally registered my annoyance at the presence of the Tomcat favicon, and created a little loupe-based thing based on the banner.

We have a large number (126) HBC images in our incoming collection. Of these TB has processed eleven, and marked up five so far. Those have been added to the maps folders, both locally on my machine (and therefore backed-up to Rutabaga) and on the coldesp account on home1t. This is documentation of how such images should be processed prior to being marked up with the Image Markup Tool.

• The first stage in the process is for someone to examine each image, trim it (to remove the colour bar etc.), and possibly try to enhance it, especially if it's a bit dark or murky.
• Next, resizing and creating the various versions. We constrain our full-size images to a maximum width of 5000 pixels; we also use images at 1000, 200, and 100 pixels (the last are our thumbnails). There is a script in trunk/utilities called process_map_images.sh which you run as follows:
  • Copy all the trimmed/enhanced images you want to process into an empty folder.
  • Copy the script there too, and make it executable. (The script is for Bash, and requires ImageMagick.)
  • Run the script. It should create subfolders for each of the four sizes we require.
  • Copy the contents of those folders into the equivalent folders where the existing maps are stored (including on home1t/coldesp/www/maps).
• An encoder can now get one of these images off the web server, and store it directly in the trunk folder in their svn repo (without adding it to svn, of course). Then they can clone an existing image markup file, tweak the metadata in Oxygen, then in the Image Markup Tool, delete all the boxes and replace the image. Then they're ready to start annotating.

I've written some XSLT to scale the image markup for any maps which were marked up with larger-scale images than we conventionally use on the site. This may be handy in future too. I still need to do the actual scaling of all remaining HBC maps that have been added to the system. That'll have to be handled through a script.

TB has been working on image markup, but the HBC images on which he's working aren't yet in the system. I've processed and uploaded the 11 he's picked out, but I should probably convert all the remaining ones to the right sizes too, for future use.

Regenerated all the OAI records locally, then uploaded them to the db, and provided a zip for the library to process into whatever Canadiana requires (it can't ingest OAI effectively, apparently).

Finished uploading all the changed files to the db -- it took about five hours. In the meantime, I've started a Schematron file with some basic constraints, and shown KSW how to use it; he'll generate some more ideas for constraints from the documentation, and we'll then add the Schematron constraint to the top of the files so it's in force for everyone editing.