HCMC Blogs

Talked with everyone on staff and wrote update of what we've been doing and submitted it to the associate dean. Following is the summary and issues to be addressed, the report also includes details on incoming requests, completed projects and our current work.

We've completed two major and two minor projects. We've received two
major project proposal requests. Our software developers are fully
committed until end of Dec. 2009 on projects and ongoing work details
below. I estimate that if both proposals we've received are accepted,
developer time for major projects will be committed until August 2010 at least.
We document all our activities at http://hcmc.uvic.ca/blogs

The renovation is almost complete and the bookable computers are operational. We have drafted policy and terms for use of the bookable computers which we attached to the update. We have implemented a booking system and are accepting requests. The schedule for bookable computers is at http://hcmc.uvic.ca/schedule

The HCMC has always been entitled to invite one Lansdowne scholar per
year. Is that still the case? If so, who to invite at our next
opportunity? If not, what happens to that money?

The Academic Director of HCMC has always been entitled to sit at the
committee of department chairs. How should that function be fulfilled now?

The HCMC is now responsible for approximately 20 computers (servers, staff workstations, bookable workstations) of varying ages (an increase of about 8). The useful lifespan of any one of them is about 4 years, so we'll need money for approximately 2 computers per year in addition to what we're spending now.

By the end of the week, I had done some research on OJS, obtained a Journal Manager account and done some testing (mostly in Setup - The Look), and corresponded with IK. The answers to the questions are:

1) Who does what work to take the material from .doc files DS works with to whatever is found in the db?
DS submits word file for each review. Library turns those into PDF files for inclusion in system.

2) browse/search by reviewer and browse/search by authro.
Name of author of book being reviewed and title of book being reviewed go in the "title" field. Name of reviewer goes in the "author" field. No chance of making the modifications necessary to add "reviewer" field and features parallel to "author" field and features.

3) 4) Add a "Call for Reviewers" page and "Stylesheet for Reviewers" page to the site with a link in the navbar pointing to it.
The OJS plugin for CMS doesn't work. Library is working on a static page plugin. In meantime static pages will have to go on a separate site. That site will have to be styled consistently with the PIR journal site. It is possible to add item in the navbar of the journal site to point to the Call site.

5) Remove "login" and "register" items from the navigation bar, and the "USER Log in" form elements on the right sidebar.
Journal Manager interface allows one to not display user elements in right sidebar. Items in navbar cannot be removed, so only option is to hide them from user using a journal-specific stylesheet. The Journal manager interface allows you to upload such a stylesheet. The problem is that the list item elements have no id attribute so can't be addressed. CSS nth-child-of selector doesn't work in IE and CSS [href$="page=admin"] selector only selects the a inside the li and not the entire li. (Also discovered that if the user is logged in, then the "login" and "register" items are removed and a "user home" item appears.) I've asked library to add such ids to the template. If they do then I can add a CSS kludge to hide the elements not wanted.

6) 7) modifications to labels, naming conventions and styling
Limited to what can be achieved in CSS.

8) suppress the table of contents of the most recent edition on the home page.
Journal Management interface has a checkbox for this.

DS of philosophy, who is the editor of the Philosophy in Review, is moving the journal from print to online and using the library's instance of OJS to host it. Met with him and discussed the following questions:

1) For OJS, what is the expected format of the material submitted to the system and what is the expected work flow? (i.e. Who does what work to take the material from .doc files DS works with to whatever is found in the db?)

2) DS would like to be able to browse by reviewer and search by reviewer. I'm guessing that means you need to create a "reviewer" field in the database and modify the code handling the querying and reporting. What would be involved in adding those features?

3) DS wants to add a "Call for Reviewers" page to the site with a link in the navbar pointing to it. That page needs to be edited frequently.

4) DS wants to add a page "Stylesheet for Reviewers" which can be reached through the Call for Reviewers page.

5) DS doesn't see a need for the "login" and "register" sections, so how can those be removed from the navigation bar, as can the "USER Log in" form elements on the right-hand side of the page.

6) There are some modifications to labels, naming conventions etc

7) There are some styling modifications to consider to make especially the lists of reviews more user-friendly: use subtly alternating background colours and/or changing vertical whitespace to distinguish records in the list, make the author's name bold, precede the reviewer's name with "review by: ".

8) He also mentioned that he did not want the table of contents of the most recent edition to appear on the home page.

Stuff just kept coming...

KSW completed the processing of the remaining images for 1848, so those have now been integrated into the system.

I have completed the splitting and optimizing of all 1848 scans. Starting Monday morning, I will attack the transcriptions!

Worked through the whole of the body (a task which allows of interruptions, unlike programming, and there were a lot of interruptions all day). The fine but essential distinction between a quotation with a gloss, and a quotation with a parallel quotation from a published translation, exercised me a bit; the markup form I actually need for the latter (a <gloss> tag containing <cit> / <q>) is invalid, because <gloss> is an inline-level element, so I had to resort to literal square brackets. But no matter. Everything works.

Spent a while figuring out the exact steps necessary to make quotations (<cit> / <q> in XML, rendered as <q> in XHTML) appear with guillemets instead of English-style quotes in the browser. For future reference, these are the steps I took:

• Checked that the <html> tag has xml:lang="fr" in it (it already had). We're not specifying any particular subset of French (such as -CA) because our documents span several centuries and at least two countries.
• Added this to the stylesheet:

  :lang(fr){ quotes: "«" "»" "‹" "›" "‘" "’" }
  

  Note: this will also work:

  q[lang |= fr] { quotes: "«" "»" "‹" "›" "‘" "’" }
  

• Added this to the XHTML <q> tag: lang="fr". Using xml:lang doesn't work. Note that you can't add lang="fr" to the root <html> element or to the <body> because it's invalid.
• This now seems to be working (in Firefox and Opera, at least; Arora (webkit) doesn't show the guillemets, so I'll need to check on Safari).

I just learned that I cannot put a head tag inside a list: although this is valid in XML, it is NOT valid in the HTML. In this case, then, I have decided to use simple p tags, even though technically a head tag would be more accurate.

Also: any time there is a reference that is continued after a page break, it must be made into two references, as this is another instance where HTML does not validate a practice that is acceptable in XML.

That's all for now! L.

More fixes from JS, OK'd by LB, in Verbs 4A.