This was a one-day week for me as I’d taken the Monday off to cover the school half-term holiday while Tuesday to Thursday were strike days.  Thankfully the strike days scheduled for the next two weeks have now been called off so I should be able to get a little more done.

I spent my one day of work continuing with the development of the front-end for the Books and Borrowing project, and managed to complete an initial version of the advanced search form.  In my previous update I said I hadn’t quite managed to complete the selection options for the borrower occupation section.  This is complete now – you can select and deselect occupations at any level and corresponding occupations at higher or lower levels of the hierarchy will also select / deselect as required.  I have also added in autocompletes for borrower settlement and street.  If you start typing into one of these boxes (e.g. ‘black’ in settlement) a list of matching options will appear from which you can select one.  Note that the entered text can appear anywhere in the settlement name (e.g. ‘parish of Blackford’ is brought back) and we might want to change this to just match the beginning of settlements.

Street works in the same way (e.g. type in ‘king’).  A couple of things to point out, though.  Firstly: the selection of settlement and of street are currently in no way connected.  E.g. if you select ‘Blackford’ as a settlement and then attempt to type in a street the system doesn’t limit this to just streets within Blackford.  I could update things to connect the two search boxes in such a way, though.  Secondly:  I think we’ll have to give people freedom to ignore the autocomplete if they want.  For example, if you enter ‘king’ in ‘street’ you’ll see lots of very specific addresses (e.g. ’15 great king street’).  If you select one of those you’re obviously limiting your search quite considerably.  Whereas if we allow people to enter ‘great king street’ to bring back all borrowings at all addresses on this street the search might be more useful.  I’ve also added in borrower gender which (as specified in the requirements document) allows one single gender to be selected.  Thinking about it, we might want to make this a multi-select like other things instead.

The book author section is exactly the same as the ‘simple’ search and the book work section is pretty straightforward (and still awaits the addition of genre).  In the book edition section the ESTC field is an autocomplete.  This works slightly differently in that it matches the beginning of the ESTC only (e.g. ‘T1001’ matches IDs beginning with that text) and three characters rather than two need to be entered.  Even three gives a very long list and I may make it four characters before the list appears.  The last autocomplete field is place of publication.  This matches text anywhere in the place.  For example, type in ‘lon’ and you’ll see all of the places involving London, but also places like Bouillon.  I did wonder about making this a multi-select instead, but there are possibly too many to list all at once.

There are also two further multi-select areas for language and format.  Format wasn’t listed in the requirements document as being a multi-select but I think it makes sense for it to be one.  Each of these areas lists the number of book editions that have the language / format and (as previously discussed) the data needs tidying up as it’s a bit messy.  So, that’s the ‘advanced’ form complete, although the layout is not finalised so it will eventually look a lot nicer (I hope).  But there’s no getting around the fact that there are an intimidatingly large number of search options listed and we might need to think some more about this.

Also this week I inserted a missing page into the records for a register for Leighton library and sent the data for the 62 borrowers that have been erroneously assigned the mid-tier ‘Minister/Priest’ occupation to Katie to be assigned a final tier occupation instead.

I also spoke to Matthew Creasy about a conference website he would like to put together and to Ophira Gamliel about some T4 issues, and to discuss an AHRC proposal she submitted a while back for which I wrote the Data Management Plan that has been successfully awarded funding.  This will begin sometime over the summer.

Next week I will continue to implement the advanced search for Books and Borrowing.