# Presentation: 361040

## Incorporating Special Characters into STI

**Jannean Elliott**
**Harvesting Manager**

- U.S. Department of Energy

**Incorporating Special Characters into STI**
**(with the Power of UTF-8)**

## Categories of Characters

- Mathematical operators/symbols (such as the three dimensional angle used by Euclid)
- Super and Subscripts
- Symbols for chemical elements
- Diacritics and combining diacritics
- Foreign alphabet characters (Greek, Asian, Arabic)
- Iconic symbols that have become icons in scientific literature (such as infinity)

##  The Golden Vision

-  The Golden Vision

-       But look out for “what lies beneath”

**Notes:**
Let’s begin with the end point that we’d all like to achieve:  the vision of a day when electronic text with any special character needed can be easily created by an author.  The resulting file will go through all review and approval processes, populate site databases and be submitted to or picked up by OSTI – all without any changes or corruption in any characters of the text.  Once at OSTI the characters travel, still faithful to the author’s first keystrokes, through the workflow and into the appropriate databases and output products.  Indexing works as it should.  And when a user sits down at the computer to retrieve a paper by xxxxxxxx, that user gets that paper.  Maybe the user knew how to and had the tools necessary to search on the correct spelling of the author’s name, including the xxxxx.  Or maybe the user doesn’t know how and types in the nearest English equivalent without a second thought.  The record is retrieved; the user exclaims in surprise, “I didn’t know that had a xxxx on it.”  Key point, the user didn’t have to.  In both cases the correct record was retrieved and in both cases the display rendered the special character correctly.  This is where we want to go.  But we have a long way to swim first, and that’s what we’ll talk about.  And we’re going to start by letting our own “Jacques Cousteau” show us the topography of this particular ocean floor.

## Lance’s presentation will be introduced here.

## So, what’s the situation at OSTI ?

- UTF-8 being implemented throughout
- Character errors noted
- Teams formed; phases defined

| ECD Results Page
Thermal Chemistry of Trimethyl Acetic Acid on TiO?(110) | ECD Full Display
Thermal Chemistry of Trimethyl Acetic Acid on TiO2(110) |
| --- | --- |
| SPIRES
A Study of e+ e- ---> p anti-p using initial state radiation with BABAR. | ECD
A Study of $e^+e^-\to p\bar{p}$ Using Initial StateRadiation with BaBar  |
| A study of e+e− → p ̄p using initial state radiation with BABAR
 | Phys Review D
Study of e+e--->p[overline p] using initial state radiation with BABAR  |

## Phase 1

- Focus on fixing problems happening now that are caused by disconnect between “old” and “new” character encoding.
-        Upgrade all systems ASAP.
-        Identify records with corruption and fix
-        Catch/stop potential new errors upfront

- Focus on determining realistic interim goals
- Learn what others are doing and how.
- Determine what’s technically feasible for OSTI
- Coordinate with STIP community
- Develop policy to support interim goals.
- Could be limited to intake, storage, display only
- Could be limited to specific fields only
- Could be limited to specific subsets of special characters

**Phase 2**:

## Phase 3

-   Focus on moving toward “the golden vision”
-  Implement the goals from Phase 2
-  “Ride the tide”

## For all Phases

- Will definitely be a staged approach in terms of timetable
- May also be staged approach in terms of the work process:
- Input
- Storage in repository
- Display in databases
- Retrieval capabilities

## What to do first when you get home 

- If you use the web forms to submit
- If you submit in batch mode
- If you harvest

## Next Steps

- May include a special page for updates on STIP web site
- Could include a working team
- Will involve OSTI working individually with non-UTF-8 harvesting sites
- Needs all of us to learn more about our own site/organization’s situation

## Just hang on.  We WILL get there together !

**Just hang on.  We WILL get there together !**