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By Michael Jesse
My presentation at the conference (June 2002, SLA News
Division) was primarily about The Indianapolis Star Library's FactFile project
in which we summarize some of The Star's news coverage on various topics in
an encyclopedia format.
As part of that, I talked about some of the technical ways that I had found to make static web pages interact with a news archive. I used the mythic "Daily Planet" in my examples because these are not techniques I'm currently using at The Star or anywhere else. They are simply "things that work" that others might want to try.
Here are the four pages from the handout:
- If you have a web page on a particular topic you can offer visitors an option to "click here for stories on this topic." The Search button for that option is the only visible portion of a CGI search form in which you have already written the search criteria, perhaps using keywording applied by the library.
- Obit search form
- Obituaries can be the most popular option in a news archive, but users often have trouble doing the search correction because a person's name in an obit will often include every middle name, maiden name and nickname the person acquired in a lifetime. Since these names were in our headline field, we created a "first name" and "last name" search box which actually pointed both into the headline field.
- Byline search
- You can create a static web page promoting a writer or columnist and include a search form specific to that person's byline file.
- Images and infoboxes
- If your archive is based on an ASCII database which converts stories to HTML through use of a template you can alter that template to display selected images and to display "glance box" text in a way similar to what is done in the newspaper itself.