New Image Search and Catalogue Pages

Continuing the theme from our last post, Redesigning our Web Presence, here is a closer look at how we built the new Image Search feature as well as what it takes to create the catalogue pages showing the detailed holdings of our collections.
New Image Search Feature
Our main web search feature, now on all of our [...]

Peter Murray-Rust and the Concept of “Pauling Numbers”

We are delighted, on many levels, to have added Peter Murray-Rust’s blog to our gradually expanding Blogroll.  A faculty member of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge, Dr. Murray-Rust shares our interests in, among other topics, chemistry, xml and open access to information.
He and his team have developed a Chemical Markup Language, or CML, [...]

The Building Blocks of Linus Pauling Day-by-Day, Part 2: XSLT

In our last post we discussed the four XML pieces that form the content of Linus Pauling Day-by-Day. Once properly formatted, these disparate elements are then combined into a cohesive, web-ready whole using a set of rules called Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). This post will delve more deeply into XSLT and how [...]

The Building Blocks of Linus Pauling Day-by-Day

Any given page in the Linus Pauling Day-by-Day calendar is the product of up to four different XML records.  These records describe the various bits of data that comprise the project – be they document summaries, images or full-text transcripts.  The data contained in the various XML records are then interpreted by XSL stylesheets, which [...]

“It’s in the Blood!” A Revised, METS-based Website

“It [hemoglobin] is a good substance from the standpoint of a chemist, because of its availability. All you need to do is to catch somebody, introduce a hypodermic needle and draw out a sample of blood. A standard victim of this practice, weighing perhaps 120 pounds (it’s easier to catch them small!) contains in the [...]

A New TEI Lite Project: The Pauling Student Learning Curriculum

This past Friday we launched a new project about which we’re pretty excited.  As described in this press release, the Pauling Student Learning Curriculum is geared toward advanced high school- and college-age students, and is applicable to the teaching of both history and science.  As the press release also notes, the large amount of illustrative [...]

Creating The Pauling Catalogue: Page Design

[Part 7 of 9]
Once the publication’s text had been encoded and its illustrations selected, the next major challenge in creating The Pauling Catalogue was the actual design of the publication, page-by-page and volume-by-volume.  This process was carried out chiefly through the skillful implementation of Adobe’s InDesign software.
Having marked-up the raw text of the publication in [...]

Creating The Pauling Catalogue: Typography and Proofreading

[Part 6 of 9]
As work on The Pauling Catalogue moved further in the direction of what would become the finished product, one surprisingly difficult set of decisions requiring action concerned the typography of the set’s 1,700+ pages.
After much research, two typefaces – Palatino Lynotype and Myriad Pro – and ten fonts were purchased for use [...]

Creating The Pauling Catalogue: Formatting Text with XML and XSL

[Part 4 of 9] One of the earliest and most pressing questions that the project team had to answer in constructing The Pauling Catalogue was how to go about formatting the text of such a massive document. The catalogue had been generated over many years as a series of WordPerfect word processing documents. While [...]