Trying to figure out why MoEML is running some operations at glacial speed...
May 30, 2013
All ready for next week now.
Spent most of the day cleaning up the database to remove duplicate copies of files, fix duplicate ids, and similar infelicities which might lead to the slowdown we're seeing in performance. Problems have gone away with regular files and searches, but the Stow 1598 is still proving to be a killer, and we're working with RE to figure out why it's taking so long.
Is anyone interested in following up with the President-Elect of Rotary? This doesn't fall under my two themes, but I will if Ben and Ashley are too busy.
Hannah: I'll do Rotary, but probably after I finish with the churches. The contact info would be greatly appreciated! -Ben
Hi, I'm adding photos to my archive folder from the Saanich Archives online site. Do we have permission to use them yet?
Ashley and I met yesterday to figure out the proper workings of the Dropbox and Excel spreadsheets and as she mentioned it looks like it is working well now. I did some final troubleshooting, reading and experiments with it today and came up with this suggestion in case people haven't done so yet:
Go to the Dropbox website and find the download button in the top right. If you download a dropbox folder, you have access to all your files right on your computer. This is handy not only for easier navigation, but it also works for saving items as if they were on your own hard drive (open a file from the dropbox folder on your computer, simply click save when you're finished, and it returns automatically to the dropbox folder). This is also handy for updating files that only you are working on because (contrary to what I thought yesterday Ashley) it works even when not connected to the internet. How? Well it saves the files on your computer and then automatically updates when next connected. This saves a lot of the issues we were having with multiple copies of one document or having things both on computers and online. Hope this makes sense!
As for me, I was with Hannah at St. Ann's in the morning, met with Ashley about the Excel sheet and to discuss archive requirements in the afternoon, and dropped by the Anglican Diocese archives in preparation for my visit on Monday. I was surprised to find out the Christ Church Cathedral is actually a newer building (1929) and that most of their artifacts are from the Second World War. So the archives will be my primary source for that congregation and the others from the 1913-1919 period. When I was there I ran into a city counsellor who was very interested in our project and wants to be kept up to date. Networking! Today as I wait to hear back from churches again, I'm updating my archive folder and continuing background research on the churches so I have a better picture of what to look for in the archives and what Victoria's faith community looked like in 1913. My minutes are for both days because I have to run to my other job right at five today.
Ashley: Was the person you networked with Julie Cormier? I don't know if you were there early enough to meet her. I met with her in the morning and she is very interested in sharing some of her information (her society is in the midst of creating an early-Victoria church walking tour and we will be meeting in a few weeks once that has calmed down for her).
Kirsten: Your Excel sheet is going to be a bit different from everyone else's because you are using a Mac. Let me know if you're having any problems with it, I've left it as is and will take a look at it on your computer. The best thing for us would be either getting Excel for Mac or a program that can save files in Excel for PC format or Ashley may have problems keeping yours up to date/transferring information.
May 29, 2013
I've made us each a separate spreadsheet in the dropbox folders for each of us. We had multiple versions of the combined spreadsheet in dropbox yesterday and I was worried about loosing data becasue more than one of us is making changes at the same time.
I've also updated the tags in each spreadsheet. I think that the tags should be thematic rather than descriptive of the document. For example, I've removed photograph and document. That information should be in the description section. I'm envisioning that the tags will be used to organize the archive. So students will follow from one document to the next via a tag. A student may want to follow the Oak Bay connection from one photo to the next but isn't likely to follow a connection between two photos because they are both photos.
If you are adding new tags to your sheet, think about the scope. For example, I've used religion rather than church to keep the number of tags to a manageable size. I will give everyone time to visit a few archives and add some documents, so that we can see if we need to add more tags, and in a week or two we can finalize the list.
In the meantime, if you add new tags to your sheet, please tell us in your blog post so that we can add it to our own sheets. I want to avoid losing data becasue there are multiple people working on the same sheet. Kirsten and I have been discussing more descriptive military tags and she will have those for us soon.
Don't feel like you have to fill in all 4 tags. The spaces are there in case you need them, but aren't all necessary.
I've also been talking with Special Collections and library administration about the possibility of using their equipment to digitize documents that some of the municipal archives are unable to digitize. I would like to hear back about this before the meeting I am planning with the archivists from the municipal archives in two weeks.
We've set a tentative date and time to meet with the archives as June 12 at 10am. I'll be calling the archives tomorrow to invite them and arranging for the room.
I joined Ben and Hannah at the Catholic Legacies conference in the afternoon for a tour of the St. Ann's Archives. It was great to meet their archivist Carey and I also spoke with the chair of the Friends of the Sisters of St. Ann's Academy, who said that she would be happy to help us in anyway she can. I will send her an email tomorrow morning explaining a bit more about the project.
This evening and tomorrow morning I will be working on defining my 2 themes for the website so that I will have them to discuss at the meeting on Monday.
*The hours are for today and for the few hours I will work tomorrow morning. I am working for the Congress for the next week so I won't be working on the project much. I will keep up with reading the blog and feel free to contact me with an questions or concerns you have.
I will update the write-up I am keeping for myself about what I am doing in dropbox, but here are the highlights for the past two days:
I visited Victoria High, where, as I believe someone mentioned in our meeting, they are doing a website about the school during WWI. They seemed worried that we would steal their thunder if we used some of their archival material, but I told them that this was the last thing we wanted to do. I said that if Jim permitted it, we would put some of the most interesting stuff they have on our archive, credit them as a source, and instead of a 481 student doing a microhistory on Vic High, link to their website. I was given a tour of their archive. It contains, first, detailed information on Vic High alumni who served in WWI, most of it borrowed from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, but supplemented with their own research. They have one soldiers’ personal photo albums, and records pertaining to alumni Bobby Powell, who was a Canadian tennis star, and who might make an interesting feature on our website. They have class registers, provincial exam results, registration cards from 1916, and The Camosun, the school paper from the war years. They also have some of the principal’s correspondence. They do want to work with us though, and will apply for formal permission from the alumni association, who owns the archival material. In addition, they are extremely enthusiastic about being a pilot school for the educational package, and I promised to put them in touch with Jeremy as soon as he gets here. I also took photos of their war memorials, which I will put on the spreadsheet as soon as Ben and Ashley create the drop-down menu. A few years ago, the archivist had a professional photographer photograph all their memorials. She gave me some information on him, and I am going to try and track him down to give us permission to use the images.
I met with the archivist from St. Michael’s University School, and she has arranged for me to come back next week. She will share with me photos she has done of their school trophies from that time period, and the list of names she has of people who left St. Michaels and served in the war. She has also given me permission to borrow digital copies of the School’s yearbook “the Black and Red,” which is on their website, and put it on our archive. The Old Boys’ column in “Black and Red,” tracks the alumni serving, and she has it from the WWI years. She has also agreed to let me photograph school clothing from that era, and to let me scan the principal’s diary from the time period.
Since our meeting, I have been going through Victoria City Archives, and looking at detailed finding aids, collections, and what not, figuring out exactly what we will want to put on the archive, and then I will give the list to Jim.
I attended the UVic Catholic Legacy in Victoria Symposium, and got some background information about the Sisters of St. Ann, which will be helpful in the education/medical section. Ashley and I have agreed that when I am visiting the Sisters' archives, I will get the information for her about the medical side of things, because she is supervising, and this will save her some time.
I have been in contact with the School District archivist, and also the Old Cemeteries Society. I spoke to them about sharing what information they have on soldiers buried in Ross Bay for our soldiers database, and they are going to talk to their research committee, and call me back.
The minutes are for yesterday and today.
Fixed some CSS errors in the METR1 and TRIU1 files, which were generating invalid CSS in the redesign project. Also fixed a bunch of old-style uses of @rend in TRIU1, and some XSLT bugs.
The MolSortComparator.jar file was missing from the web application on Peach, and suddenly this began to matter, as all pages in /site/ started failing on the XSLT transformation because of it. I've now imported the Java codebase for this into the MoEML SVN and added the library.