As we move the "Portal's" sandbox implementation into production we plan on doing some usability testing. Below are the question we will be asking:

1. Identify the library or archive holding the papers of Dorothy Day.
2. Find a record whose author is Graham Greene. Create an account, then add the Graham Greene record to your favorites, tagging it as "ggreene."
3. Locate resources, including primary resources, on the Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice.
4. Find a set of records on the topic of "Catholic social action." Choose 1-3 from the retrieved set and email them to yourself for future reference.
5. Locate materials on the topic of sermons and the Lutheran church.
6. Who owns "Our Sunday Visitor Records"? What telephone number would you call in order to schedule a time to visit the collection?
7. Which library has the most French-language materials in the "Portal"?
8. What is the most frequently used word in the pamphlet owned by Notre Dame entitled "Pastoral instruction for the application of the Decree of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council on the Means of Social Communication"? (hint: see the record with the call number BV 4319).
9. How would you describe the overall scope of the collection?

Wish us luck.

Visitor Information

February 24-25, 2011 ND/CRRA Digital Humanities Forum

I have begun to create a data warehouse for CRRA (VuFind) Web server log files. This posting introduces the topic.

The problem

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

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:

1. CRRA website - The good ol' look & feel but wrapped around new content and functionality. ("Thank you, Eric Frierson!")
2. Web 2.0 - All the Web 2.0 links (cite this, email this, favorite this) that did not work previously now function correctly.
3. EAD viewer - It is now possible to view EAD files locally or from the originating institution.
4. Item-level indexing - The content of EAD files is indexed at the item level making for finer-grained searching.
5. PDF display - Records linking to digitized versions of books now enable a person to get the full text. Examples include content from the St. Michael's and the University of Notre Dame
6. Text mining - After extracting the full text from the PDF documents, it is possible to apply concordancing techniques to the full text for analysis.
7. Automated updating - The "Portal" can be updated automatically by harvesting metadata from member institutions, massaging it for the Portal, and re-indexing it on a regular basis.
8. Use statistics - Rudimentary Web server log file analysis as well as Google Analytics reports illustrate how the Portal is being used.
9. Blog - A running commentary on what's happening with Portal development.

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:

This posting outlines a possible workflow for getting digitized versions of Notre Dame's Catholic pamphlets into the "Catholic Portal".

The problem

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.

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.

Background

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.