Web tools

I'm about to begin starting another processing job, but that means I have to clean off my desk. It's turned into a disaster over the past few weeks what with preparing for a conference, maintaining two websites, coming up with projects to keep my poor student assistant interested (I owe her since she just completed entering dozens of pages of a handwritten index into Archivists' Toolkit), and generally jumping from task to task. As one of the masters of procrastination, I've been delving into Google Custom Search which in turn led to the Google Webmaster Tools.

At the last conference I attended, one of my colleagues was extolling the benefits of the custom search. I'd been told not to add it to the pages I maintain because searching is one of the features they're planning to build into our flashy new site. I've been hearing about this flashy new site for a couple of years now. Our finding aids will be fully and locally searchable! Uploading changes will be automated! It will even look good! I'm in favor, but I also know that the project the digi folks are working on now has a deadline two years into the future. That doesn't bode well for instant gratification, hence the revisiting of custom search.

I logged in and tried it out. So far, it doesn't seem to search our PDFs, even though these turn up in a standard Google search for the same terms. It did, however, find a result in a document I somehow uploaded in XML over a year ago. It does not find a result in the corresponding HTML document. I thought this might be because our HTML and PDF files are not uploaded to our web content management system. They live on a server and we link to them there, in part because that's where everything lived when we used Dreamweaver and in part because it makes for easy updates. Simply generate the HTML document in AT and save it over the earlier version. Doing this saves me the trouble of logging in to the CMS and going through the 5-step process for uploading each file. After I've generated the HTML document in AT and saved it over the previous version, no less.

I'm really missing Dreamweaver right now.

Result!

I've only updated a sampling of finding aid pages with the Google Analytics code, but I'm pleased with the results so far. People are finding our pages and not leaving them immediately and not all of those people are me (I did visit each page after I added the code so that I would be guaranteed at least one hit). I suppose that now I need to update the rest of our finding aid pages, then learn how to use custom reports so that I can actually analyze the data.

Meanwhile, I'm using MarcEdit to pull catalog records into Archivists' Toolkit from iii Millenium. The process is a little clumsy but faster and more accurate than typing. If a collection isn't in Archivists' Toolkit already, I pull the entire MARC record in to create a resource. If the collection is in AT, I just pull the name and subject headings. There's always some cleanup and sometimes some duplication, but this way, I know the catalog matches AT and that our headings are consistent. As with anything, there's probably a better way, but without a lot of tech support, this is what works for now.