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Colleagues,
The registration deadline for this CRRA/Duquesne sponsored event is this Friday, October 15, 2011. We are pleased that many of you have already registered for the event and if you have thought about registering, please do so now. There is no fee to register.
Last week a number of us visited the archives of the Archdiocese of Chicago, and I went away thoroughly impressed. Fireproof walls and doors. Systematic digitization. The implementation of retention policies. The papers of cardinals, rows and rows of baptismal records, and even the transcripts of school children. Very professional. Large. Seemingly well-equipped. Knowledgable staff. The are taking their responsibility seriously.
Progress is being made when it comes to "Catholic Portal" VuFind statistics reporting.
Yesterday I broke down and re-wrote my log file import application. Instead of parsing the log, ingesting the results, and then post processing, I re-wrote the application so it does all of this in one pass. I also enhanced the program so it could take command line input. Specifically, if no arguments are supplied, then it will import yesterday's log data. Otherwise it expects two inputs: 1) a beginning date, and 2) an ending date. If given these inputs, then I can drop the entire database and re-create it almost effortlessly. The script is called log-load.pl, and it is now running under cron so the database gets updated daily.
Dear CRRA Colleagues,
We are pleased to invite you, members of your staff, students and faculty at your institution to a symposium to be held November 9-10, 2011 at Duquesne University. Invited Catholic scholars and librarians will discuss the “state of the art” of Catholic scholarship, directions that scholarship is headed, and how libraries, archives, and member organizations support and nurture future Catholic scholars and scholarship.
The May/June 2011 CRRA Update is now available at: http://bit.ly/crra_MayJune2011
In this issue you will find news items regarding:
At our March 30 All-members meeting in Philadelphia http://bit.ly/CRRA_SJU , we will take a look at where we've been and where we are going. The strategic draft plan: Goals for 2011/2012 will guide our discussion. You can have a sneak preview here: http://bit.ly/DraftPlan2012.
--Pat
Dear CRRA members and friends,
Are you interested in learning more about Catholic digital scholarship and innovations in text mining and visualization to facilitate knowledge discovery within the Catholic portal? Please join us virtually or in person this Thursday, Feb. 24 from 1:00 to 5:00 pm EST (noon Central, 10am Pacific). For event details, see http://bit.ly/hWMU5j.
I have created a set of really simple movies demonstrating the features and functions of the "Catholic Portal" -- http://bit.ly/eCls8b Enjoy!?
This is a simple annotated list of links used as an outline for a presentation to the CRRA in San Diego:
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:
Today we had a CRRA Digital Access Committee (DAC) meeting via the telephone. Attendees included:
I did a bit of "Portal" show & tell demonstrating the work done to date on indexing EAD files. (See the previous blog posting.) We then discussed ways the indexing/display could be improved. Suggestions included:
I have made significant progress in the process of harvesting EAD files and preparing them for ingestion into the "Catholic Portal". This posting outlines the successes.
Assuming a Catholic Research Resources Alliance members place their EAD files in a HTTP-accessible directory, and those files have a .xml extension, then the following Perl scripts enable me to harvest and prepare them for indexing:
We invite you to attend the CRRA reunion and discussions in San Diego on Thursday afternoon, January 6, 2011. We are scheduling this meeting before the ALA Midwinter Meeting meetings begin on Friday in hopes that many of you who are attending the ALA meetings will be able to join in the CRRA discussions as well.
At this time, we are putting together what promises to be a set of lively and informative discussions. This will be an opportunity to talk about CRRA activities taking place at your library, to discuss progress to date on the 2010/11 goals in the strategic plan, and to explore our readiness to promote the Catholic portal to librarians and scholars. VuFind 1.0 will be very near to being ready for implementation and this will be an opportunity to explore its functionality. Also, we will take a look at how the contents on the portal are growing particularly in regard to adding rare, unique and uncommon archival collections and other materials. The outlines of the proposal to be submitted to the NEH Challenge Grant will be ready for discussion. And, we want to hear from everyone – new and continuing members – how things are going at your library. Very importantly, this is an occasion to network and socialize with your CRRA colleagues.
(The following is the current collection policy for the Catholic Portal.)
Collection Policy Statement for the Catholic Portal
Pat and I are in the process of mapping the locations of CRRA members, below:
View CRRA Members in a larger map
After tweaking with VUFind's configuration files, our "sandbox" implementation of the "Catholic Portal" now supports many (if not all) of VUFind's Web 2.0 features -- faceted browse, favorites, cover art, reviews, author blurbs, etc. Please give them a whirl. Create an account for yourself and add some items to your Favorites.
NTS ("note to self"), the account creation process did not work until I changed the value of RewriteBase in my httpd.conf file from /vufind to /.
I have installed VUFind (version 1.0.1) on our development server, and the address is http://vufind.library.nd.edu/.
At the present time you won't find very much there except our indexed metadata records -- about 60,000 of them. The next steps are to edit some of the underlying configurations to enable bits of functionality (call number displays, cover art, user reviews, etc.) The bigger issues to be resolved include: 1) giving our implementation the CRRA look & feel, and 2) indexing did-level data found in EAD files. More on these things later.
Help wanted. Is there anybody out there in CRRA Land who can help me customize the look & feel of our "Catholic Portal"?
For better or for worse, people increasingly rank their likes or dislikes of a website based on it's graphic design. Certainly, usability, functionality, and completeness are very important qualities but so are aesthetics.
