Currently ePrints lists authors by using the creator field of an ePrint. This is usually entered as the cited name of the author. If you have a small number of authors with different names this works reasonably well as the system can differentiate between people without much issues. The problem comes in when people are cited differently or have very similar names but are distinct people. Then it becomes bad.

One way of solving the problem is really quite ugly: you go through and change the cited author to make it look “neater”. In fact one of our library staff decided that they would do that greatly damaging the value of the data stored with in the system, tainting it horribly and creating more work for themselves. The cynic in me wonders that they’re just creating more work for themselves later to go back through and fix it all up. So there is a solution, non technical and pretty ordinary.

So our solution was to turn authors into a first class data set within ePrints. They’re not some unidentifiable free text field with no great purpose (there was a creator ID field but email address was suggested to be used for it) but in fact they are now their own entity which is cool.

We’ve done some different stuff with the author ID project at USQ that I’d like to share:

So an author has a name, they can be linked back to a user ID, they have an email address (both primary email address which should be used for contact and alternate addresses for aiding search), a biography and external identifiers. A cool feature of the primary email address is that when it is updated it automatically gets copied to the alternate email address list,  so you can easily update an email address and still retain the old one (you can still remove them from the alternate email address easily). The external identifiers section provides the ability to list useful identifiers for the author that mean something outside of ePrints. This could be stuff like a staff or student number that you record against the author to help with recognising your users. This is also a new field type developed called ‘Name-Value’ to represent name value pairs of data and provide an editing interface.

But the problem with authors is that they don’t stay the same: they’re dynamic. So they might move around an organisation, shift faculties, join a research centre or even leave the organisation. Recording this in the author record is more than possible but it starts to get messy – we start talking about ‘versions’ of the author but versions imply the wrong concept. A researcher might be working on papers in two different faculties, each paying for his time and each deserving of recognition. In our case we also need to use that information for reporting so that we can properly allocate funds based on research outcomes as well – for us it is important to know who paid for the research.

So to solve this problem I created a system called “author instances”. Author instances provide a subrecord of the authors that permits instances of specific data to be created and associated with the author. Then when an author creates a paper a link is created to this instance and not directly to the author. This allows the author record to contain information that is relatively static and data that might periodically change (such as department or even which institution someone is at) is then located in the author instance. As this isn’t ‘versioning’ per se it also works well for when a researcher is concurrently producing papers for different parts of the institution (or even for bodies external to the institution).

This screen depicts the edit view for an author instance.

The author instance is very light by default, it only contains the author that it is linked to, its display name and a preferred flag. The preferred flag is mutually exclusive within author instances – if one instance for an author sets the flag then it is cleared for all other authors. In the screen shot you will notice an untranslated field called “deptid”. This is another new metafield that has been developed called “Externalitemref” which is similar to the built in ItemRef field however it works on tables managed outside of ePrints. ExternalItemRef takes the params of a table name, a key field and a name field to operate in a similar manner to the ItemRef and link data back in.

The observant will notice that both the ExternalItemRef and the built-in ItemRef field also have a find entry button. This button has also been added to the ePrint item editing screen as well and triggers a popup window which allows easy searching for the particular item (user, author, author instance) that you are interested in.

The standard ePrints creator fields have a "Find Entry" button as well.

So as we can see there is now a “Find Entry” button that pops up with a new window allowing us to select an author instance for this author easily and not have to worry that we’re going to mistype their email address or similar.

This is just a quick introduction into some of the changes that the Author ID system which USQ has developed provides. Ideally we’d love to feed this back to the ePrints core so that everyone can use this, or a similar system, in a great way. If you want to read more you can check out the “Author ID Notes” document on my knowledge base download site.

For those playing at home who aren’t familiar with HECS/HELP, heres a quick primer on how it works. Once upon a time university education in Australia was free, surprising but true. This was a long time ago, about the same time as the present set of politicians were getting educated. And then it progressed to be that students wouldn’t get free education but they would be given a loan interest free that would get paid back to the government based on their tax return. This effectively meant that above a certain point you got taxed at a higher rate and that went towards paying your debt. Nifty, not ideal but not entirely horrible. The Howard Government in part of its many University related reforms decided that they would charge interest on this loan, using CPI to index it. When this was introduced it didn’t sound too bad. CPI was relatively low, 2% to 3%, and the cash interest rate was comparatively high, 6% to 7+%. So it didn’t seem to bad.

Fast forward to now and we’ve hit an economic crisis. Inflation is now 5% and the cash interest rate is at 5.25%. Keep in mind that banks are at present loaning at around the 8% mark up to 9%. It would in fact be interesting to see if the CPI retained its position and the interest lowered even further making CPI higher than the cash lending rate, but that much is pure speculation. However why does this matter?

Well whilst the Student Guild’s are bleating in pleasure that the Labor government is going to give them back their cash cow so that they can spend it on useless things again. Now I have nothing against the employees of said Unions/Guilds, my sister is in fact one and the people who work at my uni refect are also awesome, they just don’t offer me anything valuable. Take for example a bottle of coke, that is 20 cents cheaper out of the vending machine up the hall a little bit from the refect than it is to purchase from the refect. The vending machine itself is 10 cents more expensive than driving down the road a little bit to the bakery and considerably more expensive than buying it from the local supermarket. Part of this I can understand, but when I was a member of the union forcibly and had to pay $40 per subject (comparatively not too bad) the fact that I then have to pay for food that isn’t competitive is a bit of a blow. Keeping in mind that at my university the Guild has manage to remove any external provider and is the sole provider of sustenance on campus controlling the two coffee shops (one under the library and another near the book shop), having a club facility (coffee, alcohol at night, food during the day) and the main refect – after all of this it is still more expensive. Vending machines are a bit more complicated but seem to strangely compete with the Guild which leads me to wonder who exactly controls them. But I digress, whilst they bleat about wanting money and how they won’t squander it (some fees were as high as $600), the Government is also talking about the ability to defer this extra fee to HECS/HELP as well and nobody seems to care that the interest rate on said loan is in fact increasing.

It proves perhaps most to me about how pointless and useless the union system is that they make so much noise about getting money from the universities and not about ensuring the good of their potential members. My Guild didn’t act in my behalf and provided no tangible service which meant that I had no issues leaving them. Turned out that the university ended up propping them up anyway, so they didn’t lose much but at the end of the day they were next to useless. What I found most interesting was that when voluntary student unionism was being introduced they complained that the sports fields would be overgrown and unrulely. Funnily enough I felt that the university was an academic location and not a sporting facility so if the grass grew a little too long on a sports field then so be it. And in this single moment it encapsulates all that was wrong about the Guild.

I keep going off track here, but my problem is of course the fact that the Student Unions don’t do a lot to support their students and expect so much of them. I’ve heard nothing about the fact that CPI has doubled and thus the loan’s interest rate has also increased.

Perhaps nobody has realised what is happening yet because they haven’t looked at their tax yet or seen the increase in their interest. Perhaps next year they will see it and then there will be some noise, though I doubt. It’d be nice to at least go back to the last iteration where the government sponsored the education of its people and they had to slowly pay it back with no interest incurred. Perhaps I’m complaining about nothing, but wouldn’t you be worried if the loan you signed up for had doubled its rate and the prospect of getting a job was drastically reduced?

In some respects I’m happy that I got in when I did. I had courses when they were low numbers (great ratios!) before they were cut and things were enjoyable. You ended up in classes where it was easy to have reasonable discussions about things in lectures and practicals. It was good.

So now I’m looking at doing my masters, I’m already enrolled and having a look at some of the projects to do. The first subject on my list for summer is e-Commerce, which looks pretty interesting and I think that I have got a project in mind that should work properly for it. I wonder if I’ll get the chance to finish my masters the way I want to or if my luck has run out.