Curious Travellers

The project explores Romantic-period accounts of journeys into Wales and Scotland with a focus on the writings of the Flintshire naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant (1726-1798), whose published Tours of both countries did so much to awaken public interest in the ‘peripheries’ of Britain. Find out more

Bess of Hardwick's Letters

Bess of Hardwick's Letters brings together, for the first time, the remarkable letters written to and from Bess of Hardwick (c.1521/2 or 1527-1608), one of Elizabethan England's most famous figures. Find out more

Consultation Letters of Dr William Cullen (1710-1790) at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

A publicly accessible, online scholarly edition of one of the most important archives of eighteenth-century medical "consultation letters", containing more than 20,000 digitised pages. Find out more

People of Medieval Scotland 1093-1371

A database of all known people of Scotland between 1093 and 1314 mentioned in over 8600 contemporary documents. It is also being extended to 1371 to include all those lands, peoples and relationships mentioned in royal charters between 1314 and 1371. Find out more

The Historical Thesaurus of English

The University of Glasgow’s Historical Thesaurus of English is a unique resource charting the development of meaning in the huge and varied vocabulary of English. It consists of almost every recorded word in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, all arranged into detailed hierarchies of meaning. Find out more

Interactive Map of Burns Suppers Worldwide

Featuring more than 1000 Burns Suppers across all 7 continents and in 75 countries around the world, this resource seeks to record, illustrate, and offer new insights into the ways in which the tradition of the Burns Supper continues to be maintained, adapted and reimagined in the 21^st century. Find out more

Seeing speech

The resource provides ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) and lip video of speech, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) video of speech, and 2D midsagittal head animations based on MRI and UTI data. Find out more

TheGlasgowStory

As told by some of Scotland's best writers, and illustrated with thousands of images from the collections of the city's world-famous libraries, museums and universities. From football to fashions, Auchenshuggle to Yoker, you'll find it all here. Find out more

Scots Syntax Atlas

The Scots Syntax Atlas presents the results of over 100,000+ acceptability judgments from over 500 speakers on over 250 morphosyntactic phenomena. The Atlas also contains a text-to-sound aligned corpus of spoken data totalling 275 hours and over 3 million words. Find out more

The Berwickshire Place-Name Resource

The resource includes historical research for all Berwickshire place-names on the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 Landranger map, including more than 1,600 place-names and 7,000 historical forms presented via a series of interactive maps. Find out more

Week Beginning 6th March 2023

Posted on24th April 202324th April 2023Authorbaitken

This week I continued to focus primarily on the development of the Books and Borrowing front-end, making various updates to the search and browse facilities. I investigated an issue with authors not appearing in the Solr data and located the cache generation scripts I’d previously written but hadn’t re-run recently. These include generating cached data for authors and also things like number of borrowings. I have now updated my ‘Solr data generation how to’ document to note that these cache generation scripts need to be re-run so hopefully this shouldn’t be an issue in future. I’ve also re-run all of the scripts now but this won’t affect anything until I send new data to the Stirling IT people.

I also updated my Solr generation scripts to split up edition languages and place of publication on the bar character (and also separating out any places in square brackets). This means each language and place will be independently searchable in future. I have also updated the advanced search form so that languages and places are split by the bar character. For language this means that where a language had a bar (e.g. ‘Latin | Arabic’) the associated count then gets added to each of the individual occurrences of the language. The list of languages on the advanced search form is now much more reasonable and less cluttered.

I was considering replacing the auto-complete for place of publication with a multi-select, but I’ve decided against this as even with the bar splitting there are still about 350 different places, which is too much. Instead I’ve updated the autocomplete to bring back individual places. For example previously ‘Stirling’ appeared in a long list of places all separated by bars and this is what was returned when you typed ‘Stirling’ in. Now only ‘Stirling’ appears.

I then created a new API endpoint to retrieve the data for a single borrower and I now use this call when a user presses on a borrower name in the search results, enabling me to display the borrower name in the ‘You searched for’ section rather than just the borrower ID. I have also updated things so that if you do press on a borrower name to search for all records involving the borrower, plus you can now press ‘refine your search’ and the borrower’s details (title, forename, surname, othernames) will populate the advanced search form, which is quite nice. Note however that if you do this then press the ‘Search’ button this then searches on these fields and not the specific borrower ID, so the results may be very different (e.g. multiple John Smiths).

I also realised that I will need to rethink how the pubdate search works as I’d forgotten that we have both ‘pubdate’ and ‘pubdateend’ fields. Currently I have just been using ‘pubdate’ but this is not going to give accurate results where we have a range of years. Instead I’m generating and saving each year in the range. This allows the search to work without updating the code, and after testing it out all would appear to work very well.

I then worked on adding in more ‘click to search’ options to the search results page. I added in a search option for ‘Holding title’ that when clicked on searches for the holding title’s ID (and populates the search form with the holding title if you choose to refine your search). Unfortunately I realised that I had somehow not included the book holding ID as a field in the Solr data. I therefore updated the schema on my laptop and regenerated and ingested the data into Solr on my laptop to check that the process worked. Thankfully all went smoothly, but it does mean that until I next update the live Solr data the ‘click to search’ for holding title doesn’t actually provide any results.

I also added in ‘click to search’ for book edition and book work title. I had included the book edition and work IDs in the Solr data so thankfully I was able to get these searches working fully. As with book holding, when you click on a title to perform the search and then choose to refine your search the edition / work title appears in the advanced search form.

I also added in a similar option for authors. You can now click on an author’s name at any of the levels of association and a search for author ID will be performed, with author forename and surname appearing in the advanced search form if you ‘refine’.

I then moved on to adding in ‘click to search’ for edition language and publication place. These also had their own challenges as I needed to split up languages / publication places into individual clickable areas based on the bar character and also the square brackets for publication place. I managed to get it all working, but of course this search won’t work properly until the Solr data is updated anyway.

Also this week I had an email conversation with Ophira Gamliel about a new project that will be starting soon. We discussed how the project’s website will function, interactive maps, URLs, page design and other such matters. I’ll be starting on this sometime after Easter.