I tested positive for Covid on Saturday, which I think is the fourth time I’ve had it now.  However, this time it hit me a bit harder than previously and I was off work with it on Monday and Tuesday.  I was still feeling rather less than 100% on Wednesday but I decided to work (from home) anyway as Thursday and Friday this week were strike days so it would be the only day I would be able to work.  I managed to make it through the day but by the end I was really struggling and I was glad for the strike days as I was then quite unwell for the rest of the week.

I spent the day continuing to work on the advanced search interface for the Books and Borrowing project.  Whilst doing so I noticed that the borrower title data contained lots of variants that will probably need to be standardised (e.g. ‘capt’, ‘capt.’ and ‘captain’) so I emailed Katie and Matt a list of these.  I also spotted a problem with the occupations that had occurred during batch import of data for Innerpeffray.  There are 62 borrowers that have been assigned to the occupation category ‘Minister/Priest’ but this occupation is the only one where there are three hierarchical levels and ‘Minister/Priest’ is the second level and should therefore not be assignable.  Only endpoints of the hierarchy, such as ‘Catholic’ and ‘Church of Scotland’ should be assignable.  Hopefully this will be a fairly simple thing to fix, though.

For the Advanced Search form the requirements document stated that there will be an option for selecting libraries and a further one for selecting registers that will dynamically update depending on the libraries that are selected.  As I worked on this I realised it would be simpler to use if I just amalgamated the two choices, so instead I created one area that lists libraries and the registers contained in each.  From this you can select / deselect entire libraries and/or registers within libraries.  It does mean the area is rather large and I may update the interface to hide the registers unless you manually choose to view them.  But for now the listed registers are all displayed and include the number of borrowings in each.  There are several that have no borrowings and if these continue to have no borrowings I should probably remove them from the list as they would never feature in the search results anyway.

There is also a section for fields relating to the borrowing and a further one for fields relating to borrower.  This includes a list of borrower titles, with the option of selecting / deselecting any of these.  Beside each one is a count of the number of borrowers that have each title.  I’m currently still working on borrower occupation.  This currently features another area with checkboxes for each level of occupation, with counts of the number of borrowers in each occupation.  I’m still working on the select / deselect options so these are not all working at all levels yet.  I had hoped to finish this on Wednesday but my brain had turned to mush by the end of the day and I just couldn’t get it working.

Also this week I investigated an issue with Google Analytics for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language and responded to a couple of emails from Ann and Rhona.  I also spoke to Jennifer Smith about her extension of the Speak For Yersel project and exported some statistics about the number of questions answered.  I also responded to a query from Craig Lamont about the Edinburgh Enlightenment map we’d put together several years ago and spoke to Pauline Mackay about the Burns letter writing trail that I’ll be working on in the coming months.

Next week is the school half-term and I’m either on annual leave or on strike until next Friday.