labor day

[calimac]

It's Labor Day, so I've been laboring. I spent most of the day at my library job, engaged on the epic task of cleaning up the giant mess that our catalog database became on its recent system migration. The back halves of about 10% of the records fell off, so I've been putting them back on, the matching between volume numbers and barcode/accession numbers is completely off (more of an aesthetic problem, as we don't have automated circulation), and half the titles with nonfiling articles at the start file under them.

One of my delightful discoveries is that our new catalog programs, like most other programs not designed for professionals, can't read the markup code that specifically identifies nonfiling articles. Instead, it merely takes the words A, An, and The at the beginning of a title and backshifts them to the end. Assuming it's working at all. This is not so great if you're working with a lot of material in foreign languages, or have books with titles like A is for Abraham or A to Z.

This is the last day I'll have free to work on the database for over a week. I'm trying to get it in a state fit to be seen by the world, i.e. the web, assuming the world doesn't look too closely at it, but I don't think that's going to happen this week.

It's very quiet, in fact the whole place is deserted, which is good because of the number of committees and classes on busier days that like to take over the library as meeting space and slightly resent having somebody working away on the computer. Downside is that all the restrooms were locked (I have a key to the library, but not to the restrooms), so that was the most heroic part of the day's work.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Ah, the joy of programs written as tools for professional tasks by people who don't really have the professional skills. I'm reminded of the time I was doing a preliminary spellcheck before editing a scholarly paper, and I discovered that Microsoft Word didn't recognize the word voilà in its vocabulary . . . and the first "correct" spelling it proposed was viola! (Of course I knew that lots of people made that spelling error, but I didn't realize that Microsoft was helping them make it.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The companies that write these programs have all the professional technical specifications in front of them, but apparently they don't understand them. Whether they don't have anybody working for them who knows what the technical specifications are for and how they work in the real world, or if they have such people and just ignore them, I don't know. Probably the latter, because the big-server programs for real professionals (the ones I've been talking about are intended for use by nonprofessionals and run on PCs or Macs), which get the technical details right, still have the most impossible and irritating user interfaces that catalogers complain about constantly.

It's all a subset of the larger problem of software designers ignoring feedback from their users.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Yes - it's horrifying.

PeopleSoft almost alone among big software companies had in-house subject matter experts on the type of programs they were writing. You know what happened to them.

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

I am always requesting my word processing programs to "learn" words. Sometimes it surprises me when a particular word is not already in their spell-check list.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I had to tell Word that "superhero" was an English word; it wanted to change it to "superego," which, when you think about it, makes a skewed kind of sense.