Depts

Karin asked by Ray to write a plan for the Canadian Reseach Knowledge Network which would be the basis of a call for proposals. Discussed how specific such a document has to be (what we want versus what we want and how to do it, etc), and value of metadata and in particular being able to do iterative searches with one pass based on metadata and then another pass based on plain text or text-in-element searching.

Then went over what she has so far and recommended modifications particularly to nature, frequency and scale of additions to the dataset(s), what capabilities they want in addition to a giant plain-text indexing etc. (i.e. what elements in each document are they going to try to parse out automatically).

Write grep, and simple text Search and Replace code to create normalized records with publicationName, publicationDate, and eventDate fields.

publicationDate and eventDate fields to contain either null or a text representation of a day in standard format

publicationName to contain name of publication (e.g. Times-Colonist)

Reviewed files and met with John Lutz on how to normalize dates in Times Colonist transcipt database. Problem of publication date vs event date (how to distinguish, what to do if one or both are missing, to what degree can instances of each be automatically culled from text).
If date appears as first bit of record, then it is publication date and assume it is event date unless a date bit can be found elsewhere in the record. If no date appears as first bit of record then leave publication data field empty and try to find event date in the text of the record.

Each record will include a "publicationDate" field and an "eventDate" field. In addition, each record will include a "publicationName" field, as other datasets include material drawn from more than one publication.

Will eventually incorporate tables for smaller db's on Architecture, Boer War, and the West Coast of Vancouver Island.

Spent an hour helping Trish with problems relating to the display of XML with CSS, for her medieval manuscript bibliography project.

With Greg and Martin discussed with Karin possible framework technologies to support this project, which is essentially a meta-search engine which does a lot of indexing by calling each collection using whatever API is made available and the providing the user with a query interface which returns results from the index and links to the original source and its search interface where possible.

PHP, Java likely candidates for coding.
Postgres or Oracle backend, considering scale.
Also talked about XUL as front-end, especially the idea of assembling a custom search-engine interface using a wizard

Did yesterday:
Fixed problem which was preventing Claire Carlin from getting access to the English dep'ts site for administering PhD applications.

Posted a couple of new files, added necessary text and links, and edited navigation structure based on request from History dept.

Completed 16/01/07: Following a discussion with Peter: There are now several proposed journal projects, including ScanCan and the IALLT journal, which are likely to adopt an online publication system. We need to design such a system, based on ScanCan and the ACH Abstracts, in a generic form which can be customized easily for specific projects.

Draw up a plan for this project, with enough detail and diagramming to clarify how it will be done to an outsider (such as Barbara Sawhill from IALLT).