Subject: Database update and a special plea for help

Date: Friday, February 8, 2002 2:35 PM

From: David A. Day <dad@email.byu.edu>

Hello everyone,

I hope that many of you have been following the developments of the database. We continue to work on it daily and I think we are making significant progress.  Here a few key points:

Stability: We make regular adjustments to the program as we work on it. We have identified one bug that appears to be related to WebObjects, not our own programming. WebObjects has announced an upgrade and we have ordered it. It is expected to arrive in a few weeks. The system, however, is generally stable. When it goes down, it usually restarts itself in a few minutes.

Dates: dates are now functional in the database. It recognizes the text of the date in a variety of formats and languages. It converts the text to a computer date format that can be sorted and used to limit searches. It stores this date format in an unseen field. It will tell you if you enter the date in a format that it cannot recognize. Basically it looks for dates in AACR2 format.

Basic Searching: Basic searching is partially functional. At the moment it will search only one keyword. Stephen Todd is working on the programming that will allow full-text keyword searching. That should be ready in a couple of weeks. We also hope to have a preliminary version of the advanced search available by early next week.

Data Entry: My student assistant has entered more than 150 basic records. These are records from UC Berkeley and The Juilliard School. She is currently enhancing the basic records by entering in many hundreds of subject headings. The subject headings that appear in the database are those provided by Berkeley and Juilliard in relation to their archives.

My Plea for Help!!

My student urgently needs more sample data to enter. I will also be demonstrating the database at MLA in Las Vegas on Tuesday and Thursday the 19th and 21st. I feel confident that the database is stable and that any data we can enter at this time will be of permanent use. Can any of you please help in one of two ways.

First, if you work at an institution that has cataloging information about archives available, could you or any of your staff or students please enter some sample records. If you can, please contact me directly and we will provide you with a permanent user name and password. Even if your archives are not yet fully cataloged and processed, I think the database is a great way to make a very basic record and let the world know what you have. I am creating some skeletal records for the archives at BYU. They are incomplete, but they can always be enhanced later and in the meantime researhers can see what we have in the database.

Second, If you have cataloging information about your archives already in some other system such as RLIN or your own online or print catalog, AND you do not have time to transfer the data yourself, can you please make this information available, and my student will create the RIAM records for you. If you are not completely satisfied with the work of my student, we can always edit the records, and worse case delete them all together.

We have long noted the importance of creating some sample data. NOW IS THE TIME! If we have a good body of sample data in the system it will be possible to carry on a useful discussion about style and searching. We have a good student helper available for data entry. Please help me so that this precious resource is not lost. If we can keep her busy with data entry, I feel confident that we could have several thousand records in the system by the Berkeley meeting.

Remember to check out the database go to: riam.lib.byu.edu

The general logon is user name “guest” and password “guest”

Thanks in advance for your help!

David Day