ViTaL

Things have been moving forward here at a good pace in the past couple of weeks.

The ViTaL server has been delivered and installed. It is a pleasantly beefy quad core machine which should give us a solid platform to work with. It is currently being configured in preparation for the Ex Libris software installation.

On the software development side of things, I have been continuing work on the development of the bibliography harvester component of ViTaL. I am now able to harvest references from the EDIT scratchpads via OAI-PMH, and also from Connotea using their API. For the purposes of testing, the data is currently being written to text files. The next step is to add the 'plumbing' which will send this data directly to the database.

Our contacts at the various EDIT institutions will soon be receiving an invitation for their library to become involved in providing catalogue data for the literature search tool, and we also hope to use their subscription data to support full-text access where possible.

In advance of the formal contact with EDIT libraries, we are in discussions with the library at EDIT partner Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew), and we hope that there will be some useful collaborative work done with them over the next few months.

Donat Agosti of the American Museum of Natural History has expressed an interest in alpha testing the bibliographic tools, which is an offer we will gladly take up. I will be recruiting other testers nearer the alpha release date, but feel free to contact me before then if you would like to be involved.

All I need to do now is to get the bibliography tools up to a testable state. To the keyboard...