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Encrypting communication between web browsers and web servers has been common for years, and is now pretty much required in all situations. The protocols used for this encryption have evolved over the years, in spec and in name, from SSL versions 1.0 to 3.0, then TLS versions 1.0 to the present 1.2 and 1.3. As newer versions are released, older ones are considered less secure and obsolete. As a security best practice, it is usually prudent to remove or disable older protocols on servers, so they can’t be exploited.

All software that Andornot offers and hosts is or can be run under TLS 1.2 or later, including Inmagic WebPublisher PRO. Version 19 of WebPublisher PRO, released in 2021, has native support for TLS 1.2, but there is a workaround for earlier versions.

If you are running WebPublisher PRO on premises and disable versions of SSL and TLS less than TLS 1.2 and find your WebPublisher app no longer works, contact us. We can both advise you on approaches for your current software and suggest more modern software for an improved search experience, such as our Andornot Discovery Interface.

The representation of people and places with Indigenous names is an ever more important topic in Canada. For many years, such names were Anglicized and represented using only letters from the Latin alphabet, such as these names of First Nations:

  • Musqueam
  • Tseshaht
  • Squamish

For some time, there has been a movement to represent these names in syllabic or phonetic characters. For example:

  • xʷməθkʷəy̓əm
  • c̓išaaʔatḥ
  • Sḵwx̱wú7mesh

For our DB/TextWorks clients, this poses a challenge. DB/TextWorks does not use Unicode to store data, so cannot natively store the syllabic characters, only those from Latin alphabets. 

However, our Andornot Discovery Interface has no trouble displaying characters from any character set, so can display Indigenous names and places in this more respectful manner, and also optionally still display the Anglicized or Romanized versions too.

The approach we’ve come up with for clients who use both DB/TextWorks and our Andornot Discovery Interface is:

1. Anglicized names only will still be entered in DB/TextWorks records. 

2. When those records are indexed in the Andornot Discovery Interface, the indexing process will look for these Anglicized indigenous names and places in some or all fields in the data, using a pre-created list of such terms. When found, the Anglicized term will either be replaced with the term using syllabics, or appended. For example, the end result could be:

  • xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam)
  • c̓išaaʔatḥ (Tseshaht)
  • Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish)

This can be done in subject headings, place names, and large passages of text too.

We hope also to improve searching of these terms using the syllabic characters. Currently a user would be able to enter the entire term and find it (e.g. xʷməθkʷəy̓əm)  but we hope to also offer some or all of the search features that make the Andornot Discovery Interface so useful, such as stemming and wildcards and relevancy scores based on these terms. We’ll be working on this second step in the coming months. Contact us if this approach would be of use to you.

 

The Elgin Country Archives and Museum has used DB/TextWorks to manage their collections for many years, and has long made them searchable online using software from Andornot. They were one of our first clients to rebuild their online search using a responsive web interface that adapts to users screen sizes, from desktop down to mobile.

Now, they've rebuilt their online presence using our Andornot Discovery Interface, to provide the best possible search experience for their community.

The new site is available at https://heritagecollections.elgin.ca and features not only the holdings of the main Elgin County Archives and Museum, but also those of nine other museums physically located within Elgin County, but operating independently. This one-stop search gives the local community excellent access to local history resources.

Elgin_Home.jpg

Of almost 300,000 records available in https://heritagecollections.elgin.ca, over half feature digital media immediately available online. These are primarily photographs of local people, places and artifacts, but also audio and video recordings, PDFs and, new to this site, very high resolution fire insurance maps. These maps are made very accessible in the site with a zoom feature that allows users to smoothly zoom in to a high level of detail on small areas of the map.

Elgin_Fire_Insurance_Map.jpg

When searching, features such as spelling corrections and search suggestions, relevancy-ranked results, and facets such as name, place, date, material type and more help user to quickly locate items of interest. Items may be shared on social media, saved and bookmarked, or easily submitted to the museum and archives to request more information, or order photographic reprints.

https://heritagecollections.elgin.ca also features the Disqus commenting system, which allows the local community to engage with other members and museum and archives staff, helping to identify people or places in photographs, correct errors, and discuss the rich history of Elgin county. 

If you have new staff, students or volunteers who may need to search or add records to your databases, it is a good idea to have guidelines on data entry protocols, and some instructions on how to search effectively. However printed documents are often lost or not readily accessible, so we recommend adding notes and hints to the DB/TextWorks forms themselves. These can be as brief or as lengthy as you need – we have designed some forms for clients with incredibly detailed instructions.

The databases in all our DB/TextWorks kits feature query screens with searching hints in a text box at the bottom:

SearchScreenHints

We also often add brief instructions in a text box right next to each field on data entry screens. We indicate in the label formatting whether a field is required (red) or has a validation list (underlined).

In the screenshot below we have also divided a long data entry screen up into sections with black textboxes, and resized boxes to indicate the length of a typical entry.

EditScreenHints

The DB/TextWorks Form Designer is a drag and drop WYSIWYG interface so quite easy to learn. If in doubt use Save As to make a copy of an existing form while you experiment.

When adding either a form or a text box, parameters such as size, label position and font are inherited from the box above of the same type. You can also click on a box, and right click to copy and then paste to create multiple matching boxes for your hints.

These simple conventions and the addition of hints can make the search and data entry experience much easier for your new or irregular users! We still occasionally find clients just using the basic forms – taking advantage of these design capabilities can dramatically improve the usability of your database.

We can of course help you!  Contact us if you’d like any training or assistance with designing any DB/TextWorks screens.

Did you know that DB/TextWorks has a built-in image viewer? And that it can be used to view not only images but PDFs as well? As a well-established software application, DB/TextWorks has quite a few features that aren’t always well known or used.

Lately we’ve been helping clients make good use of the image / document viewer as part of our DB/TextWorks hosting service. This service is mainly about providing access only to DB/TextWorks software on our server, but not necessarily the entire ecosystem of applications our clients may be used to having on their own PCs for viewing and editing documents.

For our museum and archival clients with databases of historic photographs, and our many clients with databases of documents, when managing records in a textbase on our server, they still need a quick and easy way to open these files, if not to edit them, but at least to make sure they select the correct file name to add to the record. The image and PDF viewer built in to DB/TextWorks provides a great way to do this, since the files open within DB/TextWorks, with no need to wait for any other software to load.

You can take advantage of this feature in your own DB/TextWorks software and textbases, even if you’re not using our hosting service. Here’s how:

Textbase fields must be of type Image

In order to use the built-in viewer, the fields in your textbases which contain the image and document file names must be of type Image.

To check if they are, launch DB/TextWorks, open your textbase, choose the Display menu, then the Textbase Information entry. In the report, under the Field Summary heading, look for your image and document fields and see if they are of type Image. If not, you can edit the textbase structure to change them (e.g. from Text to Image).

The built-in viewer works with almost all image file types, but PDF is the only document type it can display (e.g. not Word documents). To launch external viewers, such as MS Word, for other document types, you can use the suggestions in this blog post: https://blog.andornot.com/blog/how-to-open-local-files-from-dbtextworks-search-results/

Use the complete path to files in textbase records

When adding the names of image and document files to textbase records, right click on the field you use to store the image or document file name and choose Browse Files. You can now navigate to and select an image or document and the complete path and file name will be in the textbase, with no typos.

e.g.

  • H:\DBTextWorksData\Images\SomeImage123.jpg
  • H:\DBTextWorksData\Documents\SomeDocument456.pdf

Having the full path will help DB/TextWorks to find and display the file in the built-in viewer.

(Note: an alternative to the above is to place the folders of images and documents underneath the folder that has the textbase in it, and then in the textbase record, use only the folder and file name – e.g. Documents\SomeDocument456.pdf. DB/TextWorks will find the files under the textbase folder in this case).

Using the built-in viewer

To open an image or document, when viewing a record that has a file name in a field of type Image, the toolbar button circled in red in the screenshot below will become available and clicking it will launch the viewer, with the image showing.

DBTWToolbar_ImageViewerButton

Once the viewer is open, you can use the toolbar that appears to navigate through all the images or all the pages of a PDF, within the record, even if they are in several separate fields. You can also zoom in and out, and show thumbnails of all images or pages of a PDF. How handy is that!

DBTW-ImageViewer

Another way to view an image within DB/TextWorks is to embed a Picture Box in a Report Form or Display Form, so the image appears when viewing search results or a record (rather than opening it in the built-in viewer), as shown below.

DBTW-Results-Images

To learn more about the image viewer and other image tips, launch DB/TextWorks, then choose the Help menu and Help Topics entry. In the help window, select the “Working with Images” topic.

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