Technologies & Updates for Partners » documentation

More great improvements!

laurien — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:29:38 +0000

UFDC (the system-side powering dLOC and the UF Digital Collections) has seen a number of great recent improvements and they’re all listed here.

Highlights include:

Embedded PDF display. Before PDFs were available as downloads and now they’re available with embedded views and as downloads.
Thumbnails of each issue in a multi-volume set can now be seen to easily browse all of a newspaper’s first pages or all of the covers of a journal
Map Searching, which will only improve as more geographic information is added

Minimizing Groups for Faster Searching

laurien — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:10:18 +0000

While it won’t be very noticeable for users, we recently collapsed some of the groups. This will be noticeable for what it does, which is to speed up searching, but the change in groups won’t seem like a difference because the groups haven’t been used much and the collections have instead. This doesn’t change the collections, so the only noticeable change will be faster searching.

It’s always nice when under the hood changes can stay under the hood, making the system better without introducing any confusion or problems!

Collapsed, Expandable Lists for Multiple Issues

laurien — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:48:46 +0000

The latest UFDC has many new behind the scenes improvements and many others are planned. In addition to infrastructure work, the latest release includes a few forward-facing improvements as well. For instance, items with multiple issues–like newspapers–now show with collapsed lists of issues. For instance in dLOC’s newspaper subcollection, what would have once taken 19 lines for the 19 issues of 7 Días del Diario de la Marina en el Exilio now takes only one line with:

+ 7 días del Diario de la marina en el exilio ( 19 issues )

The “+” sign allows users to expand the list without going to a new page. While it may not be noticed for a bit, UFDC also added a printer friendlier stylesheet to help ensure less paper use when printing.

Short delay in loading, should be running again tomorrow

laurien — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:06:49 +0000

We’re again delayed on loading with the last load on 3/13. This is a case of growing pains again and we’ve been working on plans and ordering for a major storage upgrade which should be in place soon. In the meantime we’ve all been quite productive–which is wonderful–but it means we had to put in temporary solution in place. The temporary solution should be in place tomorrow and then we’ll be loading again. Hopefully this will be the only temporary solution until we have the real solution, but I’ll keep posting updates in we have other delays or workarounds.

Older Files Loading

laurien — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:19:47 +0000

We’re slowly working through older files that hadn’t been able to be loaded in the days before UFDC and dLOC began. Some of these earlier files are quirky and we’re processing them before loading, but in case any still seem quirky or in case you have any questions on them, please contact us and we’ll get the files fixed or find out their histories.

Error corrected on searching holdings

laurien — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:15:05 +0000

Mark fixed a glitch that prevented searching individual holdings. Brooke learned about it yesterday and emailed Mark and he fixed it this morning.

Even with email delays, the whole process took under 24 hours. The original email was sent to Brooke at 11am Friday; Brooke sent an email to Mark at 9pm on Friday; Mark responded that he was working on it at 7am on Saturday; and Mark responded to all of the problem finders and troubleshooters that the problem was fixed a little before 10am. This was luckily only a glitch and Mark was incredibly responsive for a super-fast fix and respond time, but all problems can have faster fixes if we can find them more quickly. If you ever notice any problems, or just things that seem quirky, please let us know so we can make sure there are no problems. Even if the quirkiness isn’t technically a “problem” if something seems strange or confusing, then it isn’t meeting our goals for ease of use so please let us know and we’ll get to work on solutions!

Usage Stats

laurien — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:31:40 +0000

Usage stats are now available by date, items, views and more. Check some of them out here:

After reviewing those stats, please check through the other pages to see even more ways to learn about what people are using!

Batching to and from PDF

laurien — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:21:59 +0000

I’d never needed to batch enough files to PDF at one time that I bothered to look up how to do it until today, luckily this page explains how to batch files to PDF using Adobe Acrobat Professional.

New Toolbox and METS Editor Released

laurien — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:25:12 +0000

There’s a new version of the toolbox out for internal DLC users, and a new version of the metadata template alone for its users.

Updates!

laurien — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 00:59:27 +0000

We’ve got a lot going on in addition to normal work-overload. New stuff includes:

Logan is testing a new backup with Open Systems, and this will be up and running soon and in test for up to two weeks. This is a campus tivoli-server solution which would charge for the amount of data transferred in and the amount stored on a daily basis. The cost is now reasonable, especially given the time and expense of burning DVDs for immediate-access backups. Hopefully we can move to this and drop the final burning step of the process for an automated backup to the CNS server. This solution requires a non-VM machine on our end to run the transfer/backup software, which may be the AV machine (we may run the AV box as a VM since that would free up the current-AV box for backups and mean we don’t have to worry with an integrated service with a different config).
Mark and Logan are working on setting up some processing steps on the SAN, including running the following as automated tasks (scheduled times and delays and checks…) PreQC; OCR; GoUFDC/loading; FDA prep; and FDA load (same, but more difficult if queueing needed).

These won’t happen anytime soon, but each automated step will mean less work on our end and iwill help keep things moving to make sure things don’t get delayed. We’re almost done loading all of the files to the SAN from the portable drives (aside from newspapers, extra-always-in-use desk drives, and microfilm scans that can’t fit) and we do have slow, steady movement on some of the migration projects (maps, aerials, Baldwin, Bryant, Treister). The files already in-process on the SAN have to finish being processed for us to have more room to finish with the other files, and then we also need to deal with the retro-Baldwin files (100+ CDs left, which is far better than 1000+) and with the “error” folder. After that we have the other backlog on the CDs that have never been loaded.

By automating more, we’ll hopefully steal enough time to deal with all of these. Even if not, we should at least be able to reclaim enough time to not fall further behind.

Of course, there seems to be more AV coming in and that’s more time consuming and less automate-able, so we’ll see. Any other hidden backlogs?
Cataloging has a list of all items loaded with any item (BIBID, OCLC, Aleph, LTQF) numbers. Jason should, hopefully, be able to create a macro that grabs items with OCLC and Aleph numbers, and then batch process adding links to the UFDC items from the catalog. This isn’t the best solution and will only handle some of the items, but CatMet is examining our item list to find ways to deal with them but it’s complicated.
(Complete) Departmental SAN and user space is up and running and mapped to as the Z (Departmental) and U (User/Personal) space.