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

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

The Problem

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.

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

Introduction

CRRA Update
November/December 2011

In this update …

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.

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?

Marta Deyrup and Martha Loesch, catalogers at (CRRA instution) Seton Hall University, and Pat Lawton, digital projects librarian for the CRRA, have released the results of their Survey of Digitized Rare Catholica held by Catholic universities, colleges, seminaries and archives in the U.S. and Canada. You may view the Summary Report of Results and the results data.

I was recently told to delete thousands upon thousands of records from the "Catholic Portal", and through the magic of the Solr's Web-based API and a full-featured HTTP client I was able to do this surgery with laser beam accuracy.

Specifically, I needed to delete all of the records in the Portal from the University of Notre Dame Archives because the Archives wanted to totally replace what finding aids were available. This meant deleting more than a 100,000 records from the underlying index. After a bit of investigation, I learned that at the following one-liner from the command line would do the trick:

On Wednesday, October 12, 2011 I had the opportunity to attend and present at the second annual VuStuff meeting held at Falvey Library, Villanova University (Philadelphia). This posting documents my experience there, but in a nutshell, this small and intimate meeting provided a venue for interesting discussion on the topic of modern librarianship.

CRRA Update
September/October 2011

In this update …

This posting describes how EAD files are indexed in the "Catholic Portal" with VUFind.

VUFind is a "next-generation library catalog" or "discovery system" application. Its primary purpose is to index bibliographic metadata and provide a reader-friendly interface to the result. The heart of this process is a Solr index made up of many bibliographic-like fields. These fields are the usual suspects including a host of variants on author, title, institution, building, collection, language, format, physical description, publisher, published date, edition, description (note), contents, URL, call number, ISSN, ISBN, OCLC number, series, topic, genre, geographic, era, illustration, full text, and record type. In order for EAD files to be searchable in the Portal, they need to have their metadata extracted, the metadata needs to be mapped to Solr fields, and the metadata needs to be added to the index. The balance of this posting describes this in more detail.

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.

The July/August 2011 CRRA Update is now available at: http://bit.ly/crra_JulyAug2011.

CRRA Update

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.