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.

The May Update includes details about the CRRA All-Member Annual Meeting in Anaheim, June 25-26, 2012.  Also noteworthy: on June 23 and June 25, Jennifer Younger, CRRA Executive Director, will participate in panel discussions of interest to our membership.  Details on these events are also in this Update.

In this issue we  introduce the impressive Ade Bethune Collection at St. Catherine University and Diane Maher, Chair of the Collections Committee provides an update of Committee activities.

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

CRRA UPDATE

April 2012

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:

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.

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.