Status Report - December 2, 2006

From ComPADRE Wiki

Contents 1 Marketing 1.1 Bookmarks & Brochures 1.2 Booth Discussions 1.3 Shodor 2 Collaborations 2.1 AAPT/APS 2.2 ADS/ABS 2.3 NSBP 2.4 SERC 3 Experimentations 4 Collections 4.1 ComPADRE Wide 4.2 Adopt a Physicist 4.3 Astronomy Center 4.4 Nucleus 4.5 PER-Central 4.6 Physics Front 4.7 PSRC 4.8 PTEC 5 Newly Found Bugs 6 Bugs That Remain 7 Outstanding Experimentations That We Didn't Work On

Marketing

Bookmarks & Brochures

• We need to create bookmarks for the PER and PTEC collections. Graphics are available for these, Vince wrote words for PER, words are needed for PTEC.
• Caroline and Susana are working on brochures and other hand-out marketing materials.

Booth Discussions

• Wiki used to discuss plans for the AAPT-AAS Winter Meeting, Booth Slide Show, and Scavenger Hunt Questionnaire for Seattle

Shodor

• Shodor rep is awaiting completed brochures and bookmarks.

Collaborations

AAPT/APS

• Talent Search - This is not a comPADRE project, but we've been helping the AAPT with it. We received the previous database on December 1st, and we will be attempting to connect the new front end to it this upcoming week.

ADS/ABS

• Worked on the interface that will be used to link up the ADS-ABS abstract and bibliographic service with comPADRE. Having this ready and working on PER-Central and Astronomy Central is a goal for Seattle. This will be a focus heading into the next week as well.
• Created the preliminary work for the ADS/ABS to be a federate partner.

NSBP

• Continued communication with the NSBP Technical side regarding transparent login between the NSBP and comPADRE. This will be the technical model we use for integration with the AAPT (and AAS) as well.

SERC

• Further discussions on alerting users that materials developed with SERC exist for a resource. Lyle and Sean Fox are tending towards using Catalogs.
• Requested help from editors to create more ComPADRE-related examples for SERC. The goal is to have one or two dozen examples in interactive lecture/demos, Just-in-time-teaching, and Peer Instruction are wanted. A professor at a school in Oklahoma will also be working on this.

Experimentations

• Lyle worked on making posts that have links without anchors auto-create the appropriate html.
  • Unfortunately, this is neither easy nor freely available. Because of tagging issues, multiple protocols, end-of-file considerations, and making sure punctuation is recognized, this becomes a very nasty problem. Our current module appears to work in nearly all cases (repeated punctuation is a concern), but it will require extensive testing before it is ready for production.

Collections

ComPADRE Wide

• Many global forum improvements were made while developing for Adopt-a-Physicist
  • Editing of existing forum posts is now allowed
  • A dynamic way to include (or not) the text of previous posts has been added to increase average post readability
  • Javascript methods are now implemented on the post page to alert users when their timeout is nearing.
  • Groups and individual users may be granted specific permissions on each thread. This is a crucial step in setting up the access permissions for potential email-forum connections, so that discussion forums can be "private" when needed. The individual permissions that can be assigned are:
    • Read
    • Post
    • Moderate

• Improved ComPADRE Survey Functionality
  • A survey's title and description may be edited once created
  • Added additional checks to ensure that once a survey has responses listed, the survey may not be edited.
  • Added a way to 'group' questions by adding a "Number this Question" option
    • This was for Adopt as the last phase will be the Questionaire. You can see a test of the new question grouping here: http://www.adoptaphysicist.org/survey/Survey.cfm?SurveyID=61&ViewOnly=1 (no login required)
    • Each of the 'Comments' is actually a 'question', but as it isn't numbered, it is grouped with the previous numbered question. This should give a bit more flexibility for the types of questions the survey interface can support.

• Began repository interface redesign to improve functionality and usability.
  • The frames are now embedded for a more seamless experience
  • The left hand table of contents now loads only document information pages
  • Added the possibility of embedding pdf documents
  • Added an open button for each format. The Download button downloads to your computer, while the Open button will open the document embedded in the browser window (if possible).
  • Added the possibility of auto-loading documents. We are currently in discussions for if/when this should occur.
  • Please offer comments on the change:
    • Current Repository Interface
    • Potential New Repository Interface

Adopt a Physicist

• Matched outstanding teachers and physicists
• Created forums for each of the physicists
• Subscribed each physicist and teacher to their appropriate forums
• Created accounts for each of the classes
• Made each physicist a moderator on their forum
• Made each teacher moderators on their physicists' forums
• Made each class posters on their physicists' forums
• Made updates of classes by teachers auto-update the class accounts
• Developed the class login system on the front page
• User Navigation development
• Redeveloped the directory for use by students and classes
• Limited class accounts from accessing certain pages such as the ProfileEdit page
• Monday morning around 9 EST, the forums opened
• As of now 03:22, 3 December 2006 (EST), there are 738 posts (98 were auto-generated Monday morning, the others are from the users)
• Added the ComPADRE survey functionality to Adopt and a way to number survey questions
• A lot of testing

Astronomy Center

• Danny has been working on a help file that is centered on the Astronomy Center. This file is currently being sliced, diced, htmlized, cssified, and semantified so that we can have an appropriate help file for each section of the site. These help files will also be generalized for use on any collection.

Nucleus

• Gary sent out another email for the REU positions. 70+ positions have been created.

PER-Central

• The Journal of Research in Science Teaching came online in September. We have a tagger going through the related items (130+ in PER-Central) to link to the online articles. Previously they were listed as non-digital.
• Elizabeth has completed cataloging the 100+ new articles we imported. Vince should be choosing for them soon.

Physics Front

• Development on the units interface - implemented a new design and foldouts

PSRC

• Redid the Physics Bowl and Olympiad pages as requested by the AAPT
• We got the following feedback:

Hello! I am reviewing your website for the librarian journal "Reference Reviews," and I am very impressed with PSRC. The design seems so well thought out and so well organized that I simply MUST ask: Did a librarian (or TEAM of librarians, even) help out?

It is very gratifying to find a free web resource that is, well, so darn useful and useable!

Cheers,
Name redacted

PTEC

• Further discussions with Bruce regarding the new PTEC section called Funding Opportunities.

Newly Found Bugs

• Bruce found an issue on the Events page when he created an event with a # in the url. -- Pounds are reserved characters in CF and the particular method used here caused an error. I changed it to our traditional method. Resolved
• Cathy is having trouble logging into the Wiki on her computer. This is difficult to diagnose without access to her computer and since the Wiki software is a black box. We will have a phone call early next week to discuss it.
• Discovered an issue with Firefox. For filenames with a space in them, firefox cuts off the filename (correctly according to the uri standard) and does not include the rest of the filename or extension. This causes Firefox to not recognize some downloaded documents. (This is why the ACP web mail occasionally fails to load attached documents correctly). -- Implemented a fix where our document delivery system replaces spaces with underscores. Resolved

Bugs That Remain

1. Caroline has had a problem cloning 2 items. I need to find which of the 200 fields that are copied in cloning caused the issue.

Outstanding Experimentations That We Didn't Work On

• Google Analytics
• The new tagging interface - (login required to view the preliminary new interface )
• Redesign of Posting Page including potential WYSIWYG functionality - Awaiting Erwin and a potential new IIS module on the production server