I continued with the upgrade of the BARS review this week.  I’d managed to complete the upgrade process last week, but discovered that the links to the actual text of journal articles as HTML and PDFs were not working.  Further investigation this week revealed that this was a major problem.  The way files are stored and referenced in the new version of the Open Journal System is entirely different to how things were in the original version.  Previously there was an ‘article_files’ table where files associated with articles were located but the new version instead features a ‘files’ table that contains paths to files that are entirely different to the earlier version and the actual directory structure of the system.  I realised that it was likely that the upgrade process not only upgraded the database but also moved files around too and as I never got the path to the files right on my Windows PC any upgrades that should have been applied to the files will have failed (although having said that I never saw any errors). I therefore had to begin the upgrade process again so that the files would actually get moved / renamed to match the updates to the database.

After further investigation it appeared that several people have experienced the same issue whilst upgrading, for example https://forum.pkp.sfu.ca/t/none-of-the-pdf-files-can-be-viewed-or-downloaded-after-upgraded-to-ojs-3/27381 and https://forum.pkp.sfu.ca/t/solved-cant-see-pdfs-after-upgrade-to-3-1-1-4/49382 and https://forum.pkp.sfu.ca/t/after-upgrading-to-ojs-3-1-1-4-files-are-not-found/48938/23.

I fired up the 2.4.8.5 version of the site that I had running on my old PC and this time ensured the config file included the correct path to the files.  After doing so the instance managed to find the files, meaning I could restart the upgrade from this version.  The first time I upgraded to 3.2.1 with the correct path the files were successfully indexed and added to the database, but no corresponding files were actually generated.  It turned out that this was because my ‘files’ directory had somehow been set to read only.  I fixed this an re-ran the upgrade to 3.2.1 and thankfully the files were all renamed and moved successfully.  After that the upgrade to 3.4 worked fine.

However, the HTML version of the articles were still not opening in the browser but were instead getting downloaded.  I found a forum post about this too: https://forum.pkp.sfu.ca/t/ojs-3-1-0-1-html-downloaded-it-automatically-from-articles/36024/8 which suggests that a plugin needs to be activated.  After managing to log in as an admin user I managed to find and active the required plugin (HTML Article Galley).  I also activated the ‘PDF.js PDF viewer’ plugin too.  This now means you can view the HTML and PDF versions of the article in your browser, as with the old site.  I also needed to update the permissions of a couple of directories and now the upgrade process is complete.  For now the new version of the site is still running on a test server, so I’ll still need to replace the live site with the newly upgraded version once Matt is ready.

Also this week I investigated an issue with the Books and Borrowing server, as staff were unable to log into the CMS.  As I suspected, this was because the server had run out of storage, meaning there was no space for a session variable to be stored.  I contacted Stirling IT about this and thankfully they were able to free up some space.  I also investigated some missing images and register pages from Selkirk library.  It turns out that we only included pages that had been transcribed by a previous researcher, which meant that many of the register pages have been missed out.  Thankfully we have the full set of digitised images and I’m therefore going to have to write a script that creates the missing pages, something I’ll try to tackle next week.

This week I finally moved back to my office in 13 University Gardens from the nicer office I’d been squatting in on Professors Square for the past year and a half.  All my stuff had been moved over for me and when I was on campus on Tuesday I therefore had to spend a bit of time getting everything set up and in order.

Also on Tuesday, I had a meeting with Deven Parker, who has a Leverhulme funded position in English Literature and is working with Matt Sangster.  We discussed a prospective project involving the digitisation of playbills from UK theatre from 1750 to 1843.  There are currently around 300,000 digitised images and may be up to 500,000 in the end.  Deven wants an online database to be made for these, featuring searchable text and the image and we discussed some of the possibilities.  I’m going to have a look at some of the data next week and will think about what can be done.

Also this week we went live with the language search on for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary.  This is now available as a tab on the advanced search page (https://anglo-norman.net/search/) and allows users to find dictionary entries that have been tagged as loanwords.  It’s great to have this feature live.  I also needed to update the bibliographical links to the DEAF website as they had changed their site, breaking all of the links we previously had.  This required me to update the links in a few places, but all is working again now – for example see the DEAF links on this page: https://anglo-norman.net/bibliography/

I also made a couple of small fixes to the Emblems website (https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/), ensured project images are not too large on the Glasgow Medical Humanities website (https://glasgowmedhums.ac.uk/projects/) and fixed a typo that had existed for many years on the New Modernist Editing ‘Digial Ode’ site (https://nme-digital-ode.glasgow.ac.uk) .  I also had a chat with Craig Lamont about the interactive map of Burns correspondence that I will be developing.  There will soon be an RA who will begin to compile the data and I will need to start creating a content management system for this in the next week or so.

I also continued to make updates to the new Speak For Yersel surveys (that are not yet quite ready to launch).  This included adding in animated ‘bubble’ maps to the homepage and updating the survey tool to incorporate an optional question to the registration page about bilingualism, which I then incorporated into the surveys for Wales and the Republic of Ireland.

I then rounded off the week by making further updates to the Speech Star website, including adding text to the ‘About’ page, adding in some new videos, replacing some existing ones, updating metadata and ensuring all video popups are bookmarkable and have full citation information.  For example, here’s a direct link to the ‘Lip consonants’ video in ‘Sound groups’: https://speechstar.ac.uk/speech-sound-animations/#location=65.