It’s been a wee while since we last handed out our much coveted Librarian of the Week trophy. It’s been even longer since a non-librarian got their grubby mitts on it. But this week marks an exception as ‘Tech Lead’ Andy finds his mantlepiece justly adorned.
And what makes a non-librarian deserving of such a commendation, you may be asking. Well, our Andy has been busy, in the background, tidying things. Clearly deserving.
If you tuned in last time, you’ll already be aware that Andy spent several weeks sweeping up the surplus bits and bobs from recent efforts to establish solid foundations for our Open Data Platform. Thereby saving the body corporate - and indeed the taxpayer - money. Since then he’s popped on his dev-ops hat and started afresh. The definition of ‘dev-ops’ appears to have undergone something of a change since Young Robert and Michael’s salad days. But a glance through the window reveals to them a modern Westminster, with electrical lighting and horseless carriages. Even Robert and Michael recognise that times change.
Andy has been polishing deployment pipelines and ensuring that our infrastructure arrives in the shape of code. Which makes a pleasant change. This comes at an opportune moment, as the Parliamentary Computational Section undertake yet another mission to move assorted boxes in the general direction of the cloud. Andy is currently kept employed with the unenviable task of migrating our Solr search service to a new subscription and the even less enviable task of migrating the piping that sits between our triplestore and Solr to the same home. All of which will hopefully result in architecture diagrams that look a little less like overcooked linguine.
Andy has also found the time to work with Developer Jon to host Jon’s new, old Parliamentary Search code - currently deployed and made available to the world by means of Heroku - on Azure. The Azure hosted application feels quite a lot faster than what’s currently live. Although Jon suspects that may have something to do with the unimaginable amount of compute required to satisfy the ravenous appetites of the magic sand crawling lads. More testing needed.
Congratulations on your first ever Librarian of the Week trophy, Andy. We’re afraid that it comes with no cash bonus and the trophy itself is purely notional. Please don’t let it go to your head.
Back in the new, old Parliamentary Search codebase, Developer Jon remains busy responding to Librarian Anya’s exacting search alias specifications, and Librarians Jayne and Phil remain busy testing his efforts. Our dear reader will be pleased to learn that Anya now has a first pass draft for a page listing all aliases that should appear at some point over the next week or so. Jon may be less pleased.
The development and listing of aliases is a milestone, but perhaps of most use to what we might call our ‘power user’ - hello Researcher Richard. Now, if there any folks out there from the land of the user needs, they may well be asking why don’t you concentrate on making it easier for those lacking Richard’s considerable brain powers? That would be because we have what Young Robert might call an Epic on our backlog, for an advanced search form that will also function as a query builder. This will enable search users to click, double click, select, deselect, and see the results of their efforts building into a query before their very eyes. And in order to make any of that work, we first need aliases in place. After all, one does not hang the curtains before painting the walls. As it were.
We remain in two minds about what to tackle next. One option being the aforementioned form, the other being data exports. To help inform that decision, Librarian Anya ran a session to familiarise those concerned with existing functionality. That looks like a lot of Javascript, said Jon, when confronted with the advanced search form. That looks like a lot of template configuration, he added, when shown the CSV exports. Also, those are not CSVs, he continued. With that, Jon was sent away for the weekend to cogitate. Let’s see what mood he’s in on Monday.
A handful of other changes to the search application have been more in the way of tidying and bug fixing. To that end, all mentions of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology as the publisher of a briefing are clickable. Files associated with a deposited paper are labelled ‘Associated files’ and not, as before, ‘Available files’. The option to download a research briefing is labelled ‘Download document’ and not ‘Download full report’. And things lacking titles, formerly titled ‘untitled’, now just say what they are. Much neater.
With our Library Knowledge Base™ rebuilt and out for testing, team:Thesaurus have found themselves on the receiving end of a whole host of feedback from the researchers whose subject specialisms that website describes. Resulting actions have been broken down into two. Firstly those requiring adaptations to the application code, and secondly those requiring tweaks to the Parliament Thesaurus that underpins it all.
On the application front, we found ourselves in a happy position whereby all changes were well within the skillset of Young Robert and Michael. A good job really, given Shedcode James had taken the week off and appeared to be having a marvellous time riding upon tiny Welsh trains. Well, would you like to disturb him? We would not. Pixels chisels in hand, Young Robert and Michael have prodded the code, and now the search auto-suggest displays subject synonyms and qualifying notes on subject specialisms appear in all the places they’re meant to appear. Should you be fortunate enough to be in possession of a parliamentary login, why not take a click. See what you think.
Back in the Thesaurus, Librarians Susannah, Anna, Harry and Ned have been merrily rejigging labels, synonyms, scope notes and taxonomic positioning as they respond to feedback on subjects as diverse as antimicrobial resistance, blood, British Overseas Territories, circular economy, demography and demographics, Dream Number and the Olympic Lottery, drugs both legal and otherwise, housing supply, the Planning-gain Supplement, private social renting, rebates, and structural adjustments. Only half of which your regular correspondent has ever heard of, almost none of which he could describe.
A couple of very minor changes to our Procedure Browsable Space™ are now available for your delectation. ‘Powered’, as we like to say, by Librarian Jayne’s exquisite SPARQL skills and at the suggestion of Mr Korris, we now have a ‘landing page’ for secondary legislation.
Jayne has also been polishing the queries used for our clock list and clock page, so if you have an enduring fascination with procedural time counting and a desire to learn SPARQL, this could be your starting point.
Alerted by Librarian Jayne to a slight mishap, Librarian Phil has been investigating why the Members’ Names Information System happens to be in possession of two different versions of the Government Equalities Office. We’re told that the one in use was created in March 2013 and the other one predates any audit trail information being available. So that’s less than ideal.
For some time now librarians have been deconstructing, polishing and reassembling the spreadsheets published as briefings in the Parliamentary: Fact and Figures series, making them more accessible to our target audience of humans and machines, and generally bringing them into line with the Library’s guidance on publishing data files. There’s around 60 of them, and we’re about halfway through. Fresh from the workshop this week is Government Bills introduced each session by department. Originally a table providing a count of bills by department by session, Librarian Ayesha has expanded the dataset to list out the bills, adding points of interest including dates of first reading, House of introduction, and if the bill fell, at what stage it fell.
Waiting in the wings is but not quite ready is a revamp of UK parliamentary by-elections since 1945. In the late stages of polishing, winner of the 1948 by-election in Armagh caught our eye. Known to Hansard as J.R.E. Harden, he appeared in our draft as James Harden. But in Wikipedia as Richard Harden. But in Historic Hansard, They Work for You and our own dear Rush database as James. Obituaries in The Times and The Telegraph confirm that Richard was indeed the preferred name. We’ve tidied up Rush and our spreadsheet listing Maiden speeches in the House of Commons since 1918, but tidying Historic Hansard and TWFY is somewhat outside our capabilities.
If you’ve been following along from the comfort of your sofa, you’ll be well aware that a tag team of crack librarians have been busy linking Acts of Parliament to their preceding bills in the state they were in when they left Parliament. And linking those instantiations to their preceding version and etc. As if the British state were quite unaware of FRBR. This week, Librarian Emma was back on duty, adding links to all Acts given Royal Assent between 1993 and 1995.
Librarian Martin has also been busy, linking all statutory instruments to any ensuing debate, this work covering off 1998 to 2006.
And finally, Librarian Ayesha has lent her hand to the tidying of 10 written statements, all of which appeared to have been untouched by caring librarian hands. One of those turned out to be a duplicate, now deleted, and the others were innocent of charges: indexed but simply stuck in the bagging area. The pipes have been unblocked.