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Weekly updates
This is the first weekly report for the Catalog Assessment and Triage project.
My time this week was spent on two tasks: attempting to build the Catalog software locally, for testing and debugging, and getting the catalog MODS and MADS records into shape to examine in a database.
I wanted to try building the Catalog on an up-to-date OS with current software versions, in order to assess how hard it would be to maintain and extend. I followed the instructions here.
The instructions describe how to build the software on Ubuntu 10.04, which is no longer supported. The latest LTS release of Ubuntu is 16.04, so I built a virtual machine based on that version.
Many additional libraries and packages were also out of date. The instructions call for Java 6, for example, but Java 6 is no longer supported (the current version is 9). Tomcat 6 is no longer available from Apache's web site; but it turns out Tomcat is no longer needed at all, since Solr no longer requires it. Most seriously, running the Ruby bundler to install dependencies produced a cascade of errors because many packages could not be found.
It is unclear, then, how much effort would be required to update the Perseus Catalog to the latest version of Blacklight. Given that there are outstanding questions about the overall suitability of Blacklight to the complex metadata in the Perseus Catalog, it does not seem prudent to do anything further with it at this point, until we re-evaluate the Catalog's functional requirements and re-assess the suitability of other platforms.
A number of MODS and MADS records had accumulated minor errors (namespace errors, primarily), which Alison corrected. All the records in catalog_data/ now validate, so I can use programmatic techniques to address some of the tickets in the GitHub issues list.
In the coming week, Alison will review the tickets and classify them so we can group and prioritize. I will study the Blacklight code and the running web app to better understand the services it provides, its API, and its data requirements beyond the MODS and MADS data.
My time this week was spent correcting MODS and MADS records that had various data or other issues. I also corresponded with Cliff over email and a silent movie version of Google Hangout and tried my best to answer a number of questions regarding the MODS and MADS records, the CITE Collections table, and how the whole update process works.