This week I began to implement the new versioning system for Books and Borrowing.  I’d written a specification document for this a few weeks ago and at a meeting last Friday we agreed that I should implement the more complex system I’d proposed.  This week I focussed on updating the underlying database and the content management system to add in the required version systems.  The database now has a ‘version’ table, and all major tables have been updated to include a reference to this.  I’ve created a ‘version 1.0’ version and have associated all existing data with this, and I’ve also created a new ‘version 1.1’ version.  Now when staff log into the CMS the current version (set to ‘version 1.1’) is logged and all ‘add’ forms in the CMS have been updated to store the current version when the forms are submitted.  All this happens behind the scenes, so the project team shouldn’t notice any changes.

There are, however, a number of other visible changes to the CMS that I implemented.  There is now a new ‘Browse versions’ menu item that when clicked on displays a table listing the versions that exist.  Version 1.0 is set to ‘live’, meaning that when I’ve updated the front-end only data from this version will be used.  Note, however, that I’ve not made any updates to the front-end yet, so for now any new data that is added to the CMS will still appear when browsing registers but will not be found in the stats or searches, until the caches and Solr index are updated.

Also in the CMS, all ‘browse’ tables now have a new ‘When Created’ column that displays the version that each item was created under.  Note that edits do not affect the version number – we’re only tracking new additions.  I had to make changes to the database queries throughout the CMS and although I’ve tested things out pretty thoroughly on an instance running on my laptop it’s possible that a bug or two might have crept in so I’ll just have to see how the project team get on.  The next step will be to update the Solr index and the other cached data, plus the scripts that generate this data.  After that will come the updates to the front-end.  These are going to involve some pretty hefty changes and may take some time to sort out.

On Tuesday this week I had a meeting with Marc Alexander and Faye Hammill, who is the Research Convener for the School.  It was a good opportunity to catch up with Faye and to hear more about the current research landscape in the School, and to consider how my role can be promoted to academic staff in the School who possibly aren’t aware of my existence and the help I can offer.  Faye also mentioned a Digital Humanities conference that is taking place in the University in June (https://digitalhumanities-uk-ie.org/).  Somehow I wasn’t aware that this was taking place and I’m really glad that Faye brought it to my attention.

Also this week I met with Jennifer Smith to discuss the paper we will be giving at the DH2025 conference in Lisbon in July.  Jennifer has decided not to attend the conference, so it will just be me presenting the paper, and we put together an initial version of a Powerpoint presentation that I will hopefully have some time to work on next week.  I also got approval from Marc this week to register for the conference.  This is something that needs to be handled by the School admin people, but unfortunately when I met with one of the team on Friday to fill out the form there were some uncertainties and we’ll need to complete the process next week.  Thankfully the ’early bird’ rate for the conference has been extended by a week so that shouldn’t be a problem.

A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by Carole Hough who wanted access to the contents of Cognitive Topography, an old website that disappeared about five years ago.  At that time the domain expired and Carole had arranged for the contents of the site to be moved to the University’s T4 system.  Unfortunately there must have been some crossed wires as only the landing page was transferred, along with links to other pages that were still hosted on the now defunct domain.  I’d been away from Glasgow for the past couple of weeks but promised to look into finding a backup of the site this week, as I am now back in Glasgow.

Thankfully I managed to locate a backup of the old site and managed to get a version of it mostly up and running again.  It was a bit of a struggle getting the old site working as the WordPress version it’s running on is almost 10 years old and is incompatible with modern server technology.  I had to downgrade some of the server software to get it to run, which is a security risk, so this can only be a temporary solution.  Unfortunately the version of WordPress is so old it’s not even possible for me to access the admin interface (even though the credentials are correct) so getting things to display has required a good deal of furtling about directly with the database and scripts and upgrading the version of WordPress to a modern version isn’t really an option.

The site header is not displaying at the correct size and I’ve had to remove the multilingual (English and Danish, I think) plugin as it was preventing the site from loading.  All of the content appears to be present, but the English parts start with [:en] and the Danish parts with [:DA]..  Several of the pages also had images and links to other pages that used the full defunct URL, meaning they were broken.  I therefore ran a ‘find and replace’ on these so they should now work and there hopefully won’t be any links to the defunct URL.

I shared the temporary URL with Carole and we are now thankfully in a position to rescue the content of the old site.  I contacted Mick Eadie in the library, who is in charge of the library’s archiving of old University websites and he has very helpfully agreed to run the library’s archiving tool over the temporary site, after which the site should be preserved and accessible via their archiving tool, at which point the T4 page about the project can be updated to link to it.  Hopefully this will happen in the next week or so.

Also this week I spoke to Eleanor Lawson about adding updated animation files to the Seeing Speech site, I gave some advice to Delphine Demelas of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary about technical expertise for future research projects, I agreed to be on an interview panel for Ophira Gamliel’s project, I had a chat to Andrew McHugh about an issue with one of the SiteGround hosted sites that resulted in the issue getting resolved, and I had a chat with Luca about issues with our locally hosted server going down, which has also now hopefully been resolved.