Blogs

The Digital Production Group is very excited about an upcoming project featuring the personal papers of "Laura Bassi, a noted 18th-century Italian scientist and Europe's first female professor, " with Project Manager Cathy Aster at the helm.

More information to come, but in the meantime take a look at this recent article in the Stanford University News.

We've been examining whether or not to restore stopwords to the SearchWorks index. Stopwords are words ignored by a search engine when matching queries to results. Any list of terms can be a stopword list; most often the stopwords comprise the most commonly occurring words in a language, occasionally limited to certain functions (articles, prepositions vs. verbs, nouns).

The original usage of stopwords in search engines was to improve index performance (query matching time and disk usage) without degrading result relevancy (and possibly improving it!). It is common practice for search engines to employ stopwords; in fact Solr (http://lucene.apache.org/solr), the search engine behind SearchWorks, has English stopwords turned on as the default setting.

In our implementation of SearchWorks, there was no compelling reason to change most of the default Solr settings; thus, since SearchWorks's inception we have been using the following stopword list: a, an, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, if, in, into, is, it, no, not, of, on, or, s, such, t, that, the, their, then, there, these, they, this, to, was, will, with.

What follows is an analysis of how stopwords are currently affecting SearchWorks, and what might happen if we restore stopwords to SearchWorks, making every word signficant for every search.

I recently attended a workshop of the KEEP project (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable) in Rome. KEEP is an EU funded project to develop software that virtualizes old computer hardware and software environments. This allows you to run old operating systems and the applications that were designed for them on modern computers. The KEEP project is multi-partner project that than includes a consortium of national libries (BNF, Koninklijke Bibliotheek), the University of Portsmouth, a computer history museum (Computerspiele Museum), commercial partners (Tessella), and the European Game Developers Association.

The project is scheduled to end in February 2012 and has already released software version 1.0.0 on SourceForge ( http://emuframework.sourceforge.net/ ). This version supports:
* 5 platforms: x86, C64, Amiga, BBC Micro, Amstrad
* 6 emulators included: Dioscuri, Qemu, VICE, UAE, BeebEm, JavaCPC
* 22 file formats supported: PDF, TXT, XML, JPG, TIFF, PNG, BMP, Quark, ARJ, EXE, disk/tape images and more
* Integration with format identification FITS
* Web services for software and emulator archives