The past few weeks have been pretty busy for me, and I haven’t had much time or inclination to blog. But here is a round-up of what’s going on at the CDI these days.
MODS editor
The new MODS editor (talked about here, and you can see a version here) has been in production for about a week now, and once the kinks were ironed out it has been great. Most of the kinks actually involved simple usability issues (and a few misunderstandings). For example in the original workflow, you had to press the save button before you published your record, otherwise your changes would not be saved. We lost about 40 records because the catalogers just assumed that once they hit publish the record would be saved. It seemed like a reasonable assumption to me, so I’ve added a save action to the publish button as well as to the record status button, so when a record is marked as complete it is also saved.
The other workflow glitch that we ran into was that the catalogers didn’t realize they had to push the “add selected headings” button, after checking off the headings they wanted. While you can add an xforms-value-changed event to the select element, I found this to be problematic when using xforms-copy.
One other bug I found was that you can not insert a new subject into a record with no subjects. I’m sure I had this working before the form went live, I notice that this is the case with any of the main mods element, so either my syntax has always been wrong and I didn’t notice it, or with the latest upgrade to firefox, something changed and this no longer works. I haven’t had time to troubleshoot this one yet.
In spite of the bumps in the road our initial MODS based collection has been launched. The collection Louis L. McAllister Photograph Collection is a collection of several thousand photographs spanning a 40 year period (1920’s-1960’s) and featuring the Burlington VT area. We currently have about 140 photo’s described, with another 400 or so already scanned. We have 3 to 4 catalogers working on the collection, and this seems to have relieved the metadata bottleneck that has been gumming up the works around here for the past few months.
In addition to getting the MODS editor into production I’ve been working on polishing up the metadata interface in general. More people using the interface, makes its quirks a little less lovable. Currently I’m working on a paging system that will allow the cataloger to move from one item to the next in the queue, without having to return to the queue. (So, form the item form page, they could simple pull up the next item in the queue)I have it mostly working, but it is very slow, so I’m still poking about in my xqueries, seeing where I can speed things up. It is possible that I could also do this with an xform, although I’m not sure it would be any faster.
In other news my colleague Chris Burns and I have published an article on the CDI in the most recent Microform & Imaging Review. We are hoping to get permission to post a copy on the CDI web site, and I’ll let you know if/when it becomes available.
