I just saw this message as well as the follow-ups today. I was one of
the graduate assistants working on this phase of Dr. Moen's Zinterop
project, and I worked quite closely with the Radioactive records and the
Radioactive perl module that Mike Taylor from Index Data developed. I
also helped write some of the documentation for the test scripts that we
developed that utilized that perl module. There had been plans in there
somewhere to develop a paper that really outlined how to use the perl
module to do in-depth Z39.50 interoperability testing, but I graduated,
got a full-time position, and haven't had time to think about it much
since. I always thought it had a lot of potential.

I would be more than happy to lend any help at all in any capacity that
I can. I was always a little bit disappointed that we hadn't gotten to
really follow up on the project much, and I'm glad to see that there is
some interest in it. I just had lunch with Dr. Moen at the OR 2007
conference in San Antonio at the end of last month, so I'm still on very
good terms with him and could perhaps help enlist his help, as well.

Please let me know how I can help. Work keeps me busy, but I can find
time after hours if I need to. It's been over a year, so it might take
me a bit to get back into it, but I'm sure it will come back to me.

(I hope that didn't sound too desperate.) :-)

Thanks,

Jason Thomale
Metadata Librarian
Texas Tech University Libraries



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of
> Binkley, Peter
> Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2007 3:13 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [CODE4LIB] Radioactive records for Solr
>
> In hunting for data to help model subject faceting for MARC records,
> I've just been looking at Bill Moen's Zinterop report
>
(http://www.unt.edu/zinterop/ZInterop2/Documents/ZInterop2FinalReport_we
> m4Dec2005.pdf). It occurs to me that with all our various projects
> working on indexing MARC records in Solr, we should set up and
> distribute a set of "radioactive records" to use in each project to
> diagnose and compare indexing and querying behaviour. Probably we
could
> just use the Zinterop records (which are described in detail in that
pdf
> but aren't available for download anywhere I could find); but we might
> want to enhance them with data suitable for testing our faceting
> systems. Not sure what that would mean but I thought I'd throw it out.
>
> If you were at Access '05, you heard Bill describe the Z39.50 testing
he
> was doing with radioactive records: records with known unique values
in
> all indexed fields, that could be used for automated testing of Z39.50
> search functionality. The same approach might be very useful as we
feel
> our way towards a Solr MARC indexing system.
>
> Has anyone already done something like this?
>
> Peter
>
> Peter Binkley
> Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian
> Information Technology Services
> 4-30 Cameron Library
> University of Alberta Libraries
> Edmonton, Alberta
> Canada T6G 2J8
> Phone: (780) 492-3743
> Fax: (780) 492-9243
> e-mail: [log in to unmask]