DDI: Three website upgrades

Following Courtney's challenge, I'm gonna take a crack at weekly updates on our current major website developments.

As the Digital Service Manager for Find, which is the poster child for a larger internal programme called DDI (Discover, Deliver, Interact), I'm supposed to hold it all together. We'll see if I can hold it together for a weekly update on progress...

Anyway, that's the end of my intro/disclaimer/apology if these posts peter out. Where are we at?

We've been migrating a lot of our metadata records to the new Primo software platform, and we released our first cut in July as the new Find search service. Our main priority has been migrating services off older software which has reached the end of its life.

Last Monday (the 9th) we cut over three of our websites to their (much faster) upgraded versions:

• The GLAM organisations who are members of Matapihi have most of their content loaded into the growing giant DigitalNZ, so it made sense to move Matapihi's back end to the DigitalNZ engine. We also conveniently have all the Matapihi content loaded in Find
  
• findNZarticles contributed content is also in Find, so the back end has been migrated to the Primo platform, it continues to have its own website
  
• PublicationsNZ content (a.k.a. the National Bibliography) is also in Find, but it is effectively a subset of our National Library catalogue, so it no longer has its own website, instead there is a PublicationsNZ entry page on Find.
  

There's still some tidy up work to do, but these seem to be running reasonably well at their new locations.

It took us quite a while to come to terms with Primo's internal 'PNX' record format and how metadata records are converted during import; it loves MARCXML and simple Dublin Core records, but it coughs loudly when you throw more complex XML (especially with namespaces) at it, but we're finally starting to understand how to wrangle it. There's also a hugely complex maze of mapping/lookup tables - slowly we're piecing together the chains of lookup codes and documenting their inter-relationships so it's easier to maintain.

Our eyes are now focussed migrating two remaining services - Timeframes and Discover. We are planning on releasing previews for these before the end of November. You can check the current timetable on our Online Services Changes page.