Sunstone Magazine Digitization Project, and Sunstone Web Site Renovation (Please Support)
By John Dehlin on Dec 4, 2007
Friends of Sunstone,
Thanks (in part) to those of you who were able to contribute during our midyear fund-raiser, we (the staff plus a few gracious volunteers) have been working very hard over the past several months on 2 major initiatives for your benefit (in addition to the regular delivery of magazines and symposia):
- Sunstone Magazine Digitization Project: Much like Dialogue and BYU Studies have already done, we are working overtime to digitize all past issues of Sunstone Magazine — to make them accessible for you (and others) via the Internet. We are scheduled to have this project completed within the next few weeks.
- Sunstone Web Site Renovation: In addition, we have heard your cries, and are working hard to update the look, feel, and functionality of the Sunstone web site.
Why am I sending you this email? For 2 main reasons:
- Please Help us test Sunstone Search: We would love your help in testing an early release of the new Sunstone Search functionality. The primary intent of this search is to allow you to easily search for past Sunstone magazine articles and symposia presentations (in MP3 format) from one, centralized place. Some examples of the types of searches you can run include:
- Give me all Sunstone symposia audio presentations (in MP3 format) wherein Lavina Fielding Anderson, Armand Mauss, Greg Prince, Dan Wotherspoon, or Michael Quinn were a participant. Most of these will be free. Some (the most recent) will have a small charge.
- Give me all Sunstone articles that deal with Buddhism
- (hopefully you get the idea)
You can access the Sunstone search application here. Please play with the search, and let us know if you have any feedback (positive or negative) as a comment on this blog post. Since this software is in “Beta” form, you will likely encounter MANY problems — but please do not dismay. Most of the problems are already known and accounted for — but we’d like your feedback anyway. Some of the issues we already know about are:
- Not all titles are showing up correctly.
- Not all magazine issues/articles will show up in the search — we’re still completing the digitization.
- Not all MP3s will show up in the search — we’re migrating them as we speak
- Specific searches (like Molly Bennion) will also bring back Lowell Bennion.
- We’re adding the ability to search by author only
- Etc., etc., etc.
- Please contribute to Sunstone today to help us complete these projects: While we have made great progress over the past few months, we will need additional financial support to complete these projects. Please consider making an “end of year” contribution to Sunstone today — and we promise to make sure that the money goes straight to completing these initiatives.
Thanks again for all your support over the years! We hope you enjoy these new initiatives, and look forward to hearing your feedback.
Sunstone Staff
FYI, the ability to use exact phrases is now fixed. This addresses the issue John mentioned where you might search for Molly Bennion and also get Lowell’s work in the results. An exact phrase search is accomplished by clicking the “exact phrase” radio button before clicking the GO button to begin searching.
Comment # 1 by Clay | Dec 4, 2007 | Reply
Several changes have been added:
The layout of the search options have been modified, hopefully to a more logical and intuitive format.
The titles and authors should be displaying correctly for PDF articles now, as long as it is saved that way. Some sections of the magazine like CORNUCOPIA may not have author names recorded since they are not traditional authored pieces. Some articles may still be in need of editing.
You can now focus your search on author/speaker, title, article body, or everything at once. This really does now give you the ability to find all symposium talks by Michael Quinn or all magazine articles by Jeff Burton and truly get exactly what you asked.
The search should also be a bit faster.
Comment # 2 by Clay | Dec 5, 2007 | Reply
Unless D. Michael Quinn gave a symposium presentation in 1969 before Sunstone was founded that has the same title as one he gave in 2005, the first result in the search for his mp3s is a mistake. Also, when searching for Richard Dutcher under all categories, the second and third entries have the same summaries, except for some variations in capitalization, though different dates. That looks like a mistake.
I don’t know if this is really feasible, but when downloading PDF files it would be awesome if the title of the file was somewhat related to the title of the article rather than just a bunch of numbers. But that’s not anything major, and it’s definitely much appreciated that you can download the pdf’s rather than Dialogue’s requirement to view them only on their webpage. Keep up the good work!
Comment # 3 by austin smith | Dec 5, 2007 | Reply
Austin,
Thanks for the great feedback!
Some of the dates are a product of messy data in the database, and after the digitization process is finished there will be a good amount of housecleaning to do to eliminate stuff of that nature.
We are aware of that particular problem you noticed in your Richard Dutcher search. The search is actually reading the PDFs, which are scanned right from the printed magazines, and there are some PDFs that contain multiple articles (i.e. News and Cornucopia sections of the magazine). We are working on a way to eliminate that effect as much as possible.
The names of the PDF files are actually there for a technical reason. The numbers represent the issue number followed by the page range of the magazine from which they were scanned. However, your concern has a pretty easy solution. On Windows or Mac (not sure about other platforms) when you are saving a download file you usually have the opportunity to select the location on your computer where it will be saved. At that point you can also change the name of the file. You could give it a name that made more sense to you as part of your download process.
Keep the feedback coming.
Comment # 4 by Clay | Dec 7, 2007 | Reply