Search the Catholic Portal
CRRA Update
JANUARY 2011
In this update …
I have begun to create a data warehouse for CRRA (VuFind) Web server log files. This posting introduces the topic.
There is an understandable need/desire to know how well the "Catholic Portal" is operating. But for the life of me I was not able to enumerate metrics defining success. On the other hand, Pat Lawton had no problem listing quite a few. Here are most of her suggestions:
I have created a set of really simple movies demonstrating the features and functions of the "Catholic Portal" -- http://bit.ly/eCls8b Enjoy!?
Digital Humanities Forum
and Workshops
February 24-25, 2011
sponsored by
Hesburgh Libraries, the Center for Research Computing (CRC), and the
Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA)
Without undue difficulty I have been able to harvest metadata from a ContentDM site via OAI-PMH, index the data in Solr, and successfully search & retrieve this metadata in VuFind all for the "Catholic Portal". This posting outlines how I did this and why it is important.
Background
From left to right: Eric Morgan (ND), Eric Frierson (St. Ed's), Marta Deyrup (Seton Hall), Clay Stalls (Loyola Marymount), Kris Brancolini (Loyola Marymount), Jennifer Younger (CRRA), Tyrone Cannon (Univ of San Francisco), Janice Welburn (Marquette), Jean Zanoni (Marquette), Pat Lawton (CRRA), Alma Ortega (Univ of San Diego), Theresa Byrd (Univ of San Diego), Susan Ohmer (Notre Dame), Laverna Saunders (Duquesne), Diane Maher (U San Diego), Ed Starkey (U San Diego)
The San Diego meeting provided an opportunity for new and continuing CRRA members and friends to look at the enhanced portal, discuss future directions for the CRRA, and last but not least, to get to know one another.
We look forward to seeing many of you in San Diego for our upcoming meeting. Full details follow and are on the web at http://tinyurl.com/crra-jan2011.
Portal development is a focal point for this meeting. Many milestones have been met and Eric will demonstrate new portal functionality including Web 2.0 features of VuFind, an EAD indexing and display tool, and text mining techniques to facilitate discovery and creation of new knowledge.
This is a simple annotated list of links used as an outline for a presentation to the CRRA in San Diego:
Today I did a bit of simple log file analysis against the Portal's Apache log file. Specifically, I wanted to extract the queries people have been using.
Naturally, I wrote a program to do this work -- parse.pl. It is rather brain-dead and certainly not 100 percent accurate, but it goes generate a report of some value.
This message outlines an upcoming event tentatively called the Notre Dame/CRRA Forum on Digital Humanities:
Who: Anybody and everybody across the University What: A set of presentations and workshops on digital humanities When: Thursday afternoon (February 24) and Friday morning (February 25) Where: (probably) Geddes Hall Why: Because it is about more than find and access, it is also about use and understanding
The Hesburgh Libraries, the Center for Research Computing (CRC), and the Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA) are jointly sponsoring a set of presentations and workshops on the digital humanities Thursday afternoon (February 24) and Friday morning (February 25). While all of the details have yet to be ironed out, we expect there to be at least two presenters on Thursday:
CRRA is getting some press ... DePaul University Rinn Law Library for their recent blogpost “Catholic Research Resources Alliance Helps Locate Canon Law Titles” http://depaullaw.typepad.com/library/2010/09/catholic-research-resources-alliance-helps-locate-canon-law-titles.html
DePaul is the CRRA's newest member and we welcome and thank you!
Thanks to the good work done by Eric Frierson of St. Edwards University, the "sandbox" of "Catholic Portal" now sports the look & feel of our public view:
CRRA Update NOVEMBER 2010
This posting outlines a possible workflow for getting digitized versions of Notre Dame's Catholic pamphlets into the "Catholic Portal".
The University of Notre Dame owns a significant number of Catholic pamphlets. These materials have been cataloged and denoted as destined for the "Portal" in their MARC records with the letters "CRRA" in field 590$u.
This posting documents how I wrote and edited a couple of VUFind record drivers and Smarty templates for the "Portal" of the Catholic Research Resources Alliance. In writing this posting I hope to support any developer coming behind me as well as inform the wider open source community on how VUFind works.
The Problem
This is the quickest of blog postings outlining how I am initially providing a text mining interface to digitized Catholic pamphlets.
Jean McManus used a scanner to create PDF versions of a few Catholic pamphlets. Along the way, she also had the software to a bit of OCR. She then gave the PDF documents to me with filenames matching MARC 001 fields.
CRRA Update OCTOBER 2010
New Member Highlights
The posting outlines how I have: 1) mirrored metadata and full text content from the Internet Archive, 2) made the mirrored content accessible through VUFind, and 3) implemented a rudimentary text mining interface against the mirror.
The "Catholic Portal" is intended to be a research tool centered around "rare, unique, and uncommon" materials of a Catholic nature. Many of these sorts of things are older as opposed to newer, and therefore, many of these things are out of copyright. Projects such as Google Books and the Open Content Alliance specialize in the mass digitization of out of copyright materials. By extension we can hope some of the things apropos to the Portal have been digitized by one or more of these projects.
This posting outlines how the names & addresses of the "Catholic Portal" are made available. The purpose of this posting is mostly documentation. Documentation for myself, since I always forget. And documentation so somebody else can do the work after I win the lottery and move to the beach to drink cocktails with umbrellas in them.
Here goes: