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WordPress Finesse

Greetings CRRA community,

We have been working on updating the blog and are in the process of adding new information in an effort to make it more user-friendly.  With this in mind, we felt it might be helpful to share our findings, what we learned about WordPress, with you, as you may find the information useful now or at some point in the future.  Feel free to share this information with colleagues, family and friends.

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Google Analytics and the Catholic Portal

Through my experimentation with Google Analytics, it has proven to be a rather useful tool for tracking usage patterns for the Catholic Portal. However, it is only effective if one knows where to look for information. To that end, I have compiled a quick guide about where to find the answers to all sorts of questions about website usage. While I use the Catholic Portal for these examples, the instructions here should be applicable for any site set up to use Google Analytics.

 

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Technical support and the “Catholic Portal”

This text documents the technical support required to keep the "Catholic Portal" running smoothly. In a nutshell, it falls into three categories:

  1. assisting CRRA members in making their metadata available
  2. harvesting and indexing member metadata
  3. maintaining the Portal's software

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Indexing EAD files, again

I have spent some time re-indexing EAD files for the "Catholic Portal", and you can see the fruits of these initial labors on line. The text below describes one solution to the indexing challenges. This is implementation is not the answer but rather a proposal.

The problem

The current process for indexing EAD files in the "Catholic Portal" is seen as causing more problems than offering solutions. By indexing things at the EAD's did level, too many search results are returned. These results, while unique, are too ambiguous and too similar in nature to be useful. Moreover, the current indexing process does not take advantage of an EAD file's rich metadata -- title, date, language, controlled vocabulary terms, biographical history, abstract, scope content notes, etc. Clearly, something has to change.

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Indexing and displaying Encoded Archival Description files

This posting muses on how to index and display Encoded Archival Description (EAD) files in the "Catholic Portal" of the Catholic Research Resources Alliance.

The Catholic Portal is essentially an index of two types of metadata: 1) records describing individual and discrete items, and 2) records describing collections of individual items. For the most part, the former metadata records are MARC records describing books. The later are EAD files describing the holdings of archives.

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My experience with Archivists' Toolkit

by Adam McGinn (July 17, 2012)

During the last two months, I had evaluated Archivists' Toolkit for use with the Catholic Portal project. Archivists' Toolkit is a program suitable for recording and managing archival metadata. The program stores metadata in either a remote or local SQL database, and also allows exporting to an XML file. The documentation for Archivists' Toolkit is quite helpful, though it is fairly comprehensive and it may be difficult to find how to do something specific. I am writing this document in the hope that it will help potential future users of Archivists' Toolkit here at Hesburgh Library.

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Link to full-text items

Note To Self, this URL -- http://bit.ly/MpReCn -- will return a list of all the full-text items in the "Catholic Portal". Thanks, Demian!

Graphic design and the "Catholic Portal"

Graphic design is definitely not my forte, but I think I have finally wrangled it as well as the overall look & feel of the "Catholic Portal".

"Skinning" Vufind is not terribly difficult. Using a sort of inheritance, the implementor creates a hierarchy of directories where Vufind will look for customized output views before falling back to a default theme coming with the distribution. I was having one heck of a time getting the search results to display correctly. After looking solutions in all the wrong places, I finally copied a version of the Blueprint theme's results.tpl file to my local themes directory. After tweaking it a bit, and after refreshing Vufind's cache and compile directories, things started to line up. As an extra bonus, things like Google, Internet Archive, and HathiTrust snippet views were also being displayed. The "book bag" feature now works as well. Whew!

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Fulltext indexing in Vufind with Aperture

The implementation of fulltext indexing in Vufind with Aperture is not difficult. This posting describes how I implemented it for the Catholic Research Resources Alliance.

About 800 of the 125,000 indexed records in the "Catholic Portal" are linked to full text through a URL in the MARC records' 856 field. The vast majority of these records come from the University of Toronto and the University of Notre Dame. The process of fulltext indexing is documented at vufind.org, but I'll clarify here.

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FTP site as dropbox

In an effort to make it easier for us here at the "Catholic Portal Home Planet", we have implemented an FTP site designed to be used as a dropbox.

For the longest time Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA) members sent me their metadata via email. I was then expected to parse it, index it, and make it available for searching. A hidden task in this scenario was archiving the metadata -- a task that is not really very scalable. Consequently, I advocated CRRA members make their metadata available via a website where I could then harvest the data with us. Unfortunately and to my surprise, not every CRRA member was able to do this mostly because of local infrastructure policies.

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How to make CRRA metadata available via the FTP "dropbox"

When CRRA members are not able or do not want to make their metadata available their own website, we hear at Catholic Portal Central will create one for them. To begin the process, a CRRA member simply needs to express this desire with me, Eric Lease Morgan (574/631-8604; [email protected]), and we will go from there.  

I will then assign the member a username/password combination. I will use various techniques to discover the member's IP address. Once done, the local FTP application configuration will be updated.

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Using OAI-PMH to populate the "Catholic Portal" is not straight-forward

Using OAI-PMH to populate the "Catholic Portal" is not straight-forward, and this posting outlines some of my investigations in this regard.

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Statistical reports against the "Catholic Portal"

This text describes the beginnings of a set of statistical reports describing the use of the "Catholic Portal".

More specifically, the Portal's Web server log files are read on a daily basis, normalized, and saved to an underlying database. A number of queries are then applied to the database to create rudimentarily lists of tabulations. Each one of the reports are described below:

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Transforming schema-based EAD files

This posting describes my solution for transforming schema-based EAD files for the "Catholic Portal". In a sentence, the solution boils down to removing the all the namespaces from the input.

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Moving to VuFind version 1.3

We here at "Catholic Portal Central" are spending time and effort moving to VuFind version 1.3. To this end I have implemented a number of things as per our usability studies as well as begun to skin the underlying "blueprint" theme. Give it a whirl and share your thoughts -- http://vufind.library.nd.edu

Linking CRRA items to member libraries: A Prototype

I have implemented a prototype for linking items found in the "Catholic Portal" to CRRA member institutions.

The Problem

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Prioritized list of fixes/enhancements for the "Portal"

Based on our usability studies and conference call from the other day I have created a (more or less) prioritized list of fixes/enhancements to be applied to the "Portal":

  • add a a note to the email dialog box denoting how the from field is mandatory and requires an email address
  • create a directory of institutions, and from search results hyperlink institutions' names to the directory
  • update the "Portal" look & feel (theme) so it is based on the "blueprint" theme
  • turn off the "Suggested Topics" feature
  • fix the author searches so when author names are clicked the content displays correctly
  • make the login links float to the right instead of the left
  • change the red text -- such as the text in the search box -- to black
  • change the login label to read "Login / Create account"

On my mark. Get set. Go.

How to make MARC and EAD metadata available in the "Catholic Portal"

This is a set of (draft) prescriptive instructions describing how to make MARC and EAD metadata available in the "Catholic Portal".

Introduction

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Indexing PastPerfect metadata for the "Catholic Portal"

Using VuFind's inherent ability to index OAI metadata, I have successfully been able to index metadata coming from a PastPerfect implementation.

Starting somewhere near version 1.2, VuFind supports the indexing of arbitrary metadata types. Content from OAI repositories was the original example. Later, I figured out how to index EAD files. This was a break through for the "Portal". Give credit to open source software.

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Duplicate records in the "Catholic Portal"

There is some concern about duplicate records in the "Catholic Portal", and this posting introduces the topic to a wider audience.

The "Catholic Portal" is intended to contain links to and content of a rare and infrequently held nature. Every once in a while search results return duplicate records. For example, yesterday, it was brought to our attention that there are five records with the title Life Of Mrs. Eliza A. Seton. On one hand, few if any of these records are duplicates because between the five of them they are held by two different institutions. And each institution owns multiple editions. In the sense of a "catalog", this is perfectly acceptable, if not expected. On the other hand, the Portal is not a catalog but rather an index, and each of the five items are really a variation on a theme. Should these records be merged?

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