The main news is that BnF Collecte du Web (BCWeb), our new selection tool, is up and running ! We opened up the tool to the users in two steps : - We first used the admin functions to update NAS. We had already imported the URLs into BCWeb, including the most recent changes by the curators and some reorganisation of our crawls for 2012. We then used BCWeb to transfer the first harvest definitions into NAS. The transfer went smoothly, so we proved that BCWeb is able to update the seedlists, harvest templates and harvest definitions in NAS. Using the updated harvest defintitions we then launched the twice-yearly crawl in January, the monthly crawl at the beginning of February, and we will continue to update before launching each crawl (or once a month of the daily and weekly crawls.) We have also started crawling for the 2012 Presidential and Parliamentary Elections, but we will give more details about this in a future update. - Once we were sure that the admin functions were OK, we opened up access to our network of 80 curators on the 7th February. So far we have had a lot of positive feedback, with a few bugs being pointed out that we hope to fix in the next release, which is planned for early in March. We will be holding training sessions in March, but we decided to open up BCWeb in advance as it is designed to be easy and intuitive to use, and we hope to use the training sessions to gather reactions and suggestions for future improvements. The third step, on which we are currently working, will be to provide an external access to BCWeb for partners who select sites for certain projects. To begin with this will be mainly the regional libraries who are participating in our election crawl. We are aiming to have this external access in place by mid-march. |