HCMC Blogs

Conference skype with DB and SB to start planning the XSLT courses for next year (one at Brown, by DB and SB, one at DHSI by SB and me).

Meeting with PAB, during which we:

• Figured out a couple of typos in the XML that were causing odd behaviour.
• Reconfigured the page header so that it includes a header graphic (one of the images, resized and recoloured).
• Modified some XQuery, XSLT and CSS so that any images with status="restricted" are bordered in red, and have a warning message in the title attribute.

Get the indexen.html and indexfr.html files in the home or acceuil folder for each site
find the unique string that identifies the last list item in the footer
replace it with itself + an additional list item for the new link
Do the same search and replaces, but this time adding an additional "../" before the pathname in the a link of the existing last list item.

Some sites use actual LI, some use plain text to render the footer list
Some sites UPPER CASE, some Title Case for the text values in the list

Example site using plain text:

search for
| <a href="../archives/indexen.html">ARCHIVES</a>
replace with
| <a href="../archives/indexen.html">ARCHIVES</a> | <a href="http://canadianmysteries.ca/en/becomingHistorian.php">BECOMING A HISTORIAN</a>
search for
| <a href="../../archives/indexen.html">ARCHIVES</a>
replace with
| <a href="../../archives/indexen.html">ARCHIVES</a> | <a href="http://canadianmysteries.ca/en/becomingHistorian.php">BECOMING A HISTORIAN</a>
search for
| <a href="../archives/indexfr.html">ARCHIVES</a>
replace with
| <a href="../archives/indexfr.html">ARCHIVES</a> | <a href="http://canadianmysteries.ca/fr/devenirHistorien.php">DEVENIR HISTORIEN</a>
search for
| <a href="../../archives/indexfr.html">ARCHIVES</a>
replace with
| <a href="../../archives/indexfr.html">ARCHIVES</a> | <a href="http://canadianmysteries.ca/fr/devenirHistorien.php">DEVENIR HISTORIEN</a>

Example site using li.last-footer

search for
<li class="last-footer"><a href="../archives/indexen.html">Archives</a></li>
replace with
<li><a href="../archives/indexen.html">Archives</a></li>
<li class="last-footer"><a href="http://canadianmysteries.ca/en/becomingHistorian.php">Becoming a Historian</a></li>
search for
<li class="last-footer"><a href="../../archives/indexen.html">Archives</a></li>
replace with
<li><a href="../../archives/indexen.html">Archives</a></li>
<li class="last-footer"><a href="http://canadianmysteries.ca/en/becomingHistorian.php">Becoming a Historian</a></li>
search for
<li class="last-footer"><a href="../archives/indexfr.html">Archives</a></li>
replace with
<li><a href="../archives/indexfr.html">Archives</a></li>
<li class="last-footer"><a href="http://canadianmysteries.ca/fr/devenirHistorien.php">Devenir Historien</a></li><li class="last-footer"><a href="../../archives/indexfr.html">Archives</a></li>
search for
<li class="last-footer"><a href="../../archives/indexfr.html">Archives</a></li>
replace with
<li><a href="../../archives/indexfr.html">Archives</a></li>
<li class="last-footer"><a href="http://canadianmysteries.ca/fr/devenirHistorien.php">Devenir Historien</a></li>

Example site using li

search for
<li><a href="../archives/indexen.html">Archives</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</body>
replace with
<li><a href="../archives/indexen.html">Archives</a></li>
<li><a href="http://canadianmysteries.ca/en/becomingHistorian.php">Becoming a Historian</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</body>

search for
<li><a href="../../archives/indexen.html">Archives</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</body>
replace with
<li><a href="../../archives/indexen.html">Archives</a></li>
<li><a href="http://canadianmysteries.ca/en/becomingHistorian.php">Becoming a Historian</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</body>

Added CFP for LARG 4 on DR's instructions.

Long lunch, and leaving on time for a change...

Number error in Grammar ch 2 reported by a user, confirmed by LB, and fixed by me.

At ECH's request, I'm helping FirstVoices with a bit of advice about converting some legacy data into Unicode (and into a CSV format they need for importing it into their systems). Shouldn't be too complicated; I'm still waiting for more info from them about the format of the original data, which appears to be semi-proprietary, but the whole task shouldn't take more than a few hours.

I've started implementing some back-end XQuery to respond to requests from OAI-PMH harvesters, according to the specifications and guidelines here. I'm intending to implement the baseURL as bcgenesis.uvic.ca/oai.xq, and handle all requests through a single XQuery library, which I've begun writing. So far I've implemented verb checking, return of passed arguments in the request element, and the UTC response date-time. Most of the time so far has been spent wading through the spec, which is predictably meticulously unilluminating, but there are examples, and it looks straightforward. My projected implementation of identifiers is going to look like this: oai:bcgenesis.uvic.ca:B63030SP.scx.xml, where the last component has the @xml:id attribute of any XML file in the database, and the final suffix dictates the format (XML or XHTML) of the resource, so we can treat XHTML and XML versions of the data as separate items. I think this makes sense, although my plans may change through the process of implementation.

I'm proposing to use sets for document type, year, and possibly others, with a hierarchy of type:year; this also may change. I'm hoping this won't take too long to implement, given that we're already spitting out pretty comprehensive Dublin Core for all the transcription documents, but handling the personography and other modern data may be more problematic.

CP and I spent some time this morning trying to figure out the history of incoming despatches and their attachments, in an effort to figure out what microfilms we need to order and digitize next year. We have pieced together a likely scenario that explains some of what we're seeing:

• RG7 GC8 contains images of original despatches received from London, but stripped of all their enclosures and attachments. It seems likely that the encs and atts were stripped off in the BC Archives (where some of them still reside -- e.g. the commission for Douglas); then the microfilming was done on the bare despatches.
• These are parallel to the 410 documents, which are the London letterbook copies of their outgoing despatches. Sometimes we have two copies of the same document, one from each series (e.g. this RG7 and this 410 document).
• JH apparently transcribed from both sources (at least, transcriptions are labelled as having been from both, although it's possible he only actually used 410).
• KSW digitized the RG7 series from 16mm microfilm earlier this year; it was ordered in specially, and was not part of the large orders to LAC which we're still processing.
• Where we are attempting to reunite a despatch with its original attachments or enclosures, we should prefer the RG7 source, since this is the "real" document which was with the attachment.
• However, it seems that differences other than pagination are minimal, since incoming despatches were not annotated; therefore there's no overriding need to switch any existing transcriptions from 410 to RG7 unless we are seeking out and reattaching important documents (such as the Blanshard and Douglas commissions).
• There is also a series of transcriptions marked "PABC", which JH transcribed from original documents in the BC archives, and marked as "not on microfilm"; however, CP believes these are now on microfilm, and we should order that in an digitize it to support these transcriptions.

I had previously suppressed the rendering of empty <seg> elements and their following <bibl>s, since these are placeholders added to the file for ECH to complete when she gets to the entries; I noticed this morning that there's a parallel situation in the case of quotations, where an empty <phr> is followed by a <bibl>, so I've added suppression of those in the output.