FACES News

The MPDL is part of the ‘Digitization Livecycle’ (DLC) Project which has the aim to assist Max Planck Institutes in their digitization projects and to provide services for such digital artefacts (more information on the Digitization Lifecycle Project can be found here: http://colab.mpdl.mpg.de/mediawiki/Digitization_Lifecycle).
In the context of this project the DLC team invites interested people to share experiences and discuss common problems.

Everybody who faces the challenge of digitizing structured texts is welcome to register for the workshop: “Mapping the Landscape of eResearch Text – Image – Annotation” in Berlin: http://www.mpdl.mpg.de/main/landscapeoferesearch.htm

The Max Planck Digital Library wishes the FACES users a happy and successful year 2012!
We are very happy that we count now more than 170 users at the FACES solution.

We are getting a new core service for the FACES server. The deployment of this new version, which will not have any visible changes to the end-user, is expected to take about one week, starting on Tuesday, September 14 in the evening.

In order to prevent our users from not being able to access FACES for such a long period, we plan to set up a ‘read only’ system during that time. ‘Read only’ means, you will be able to access as well as search or browse within FACES, but it will not be possible to log on to the system to work with it. Unfortunately, we cannot avoid a short downtime for the preparation and the setup of the read only system. Because of that, the server will not be available for at most two hours starting on Tuesday at 16:00.

The read only system will be started on Tuesday after the downtime and it will stay on-line until the end of the week. After that, unfortunately we need another downtime for some days. We expect FACES to be fully operational again in the middle of next week.

We are sorry for any inconveniences and we will do our best to keep the downtime as short as possible.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Due to server problems at our hosting partner, Faces is unfortunately not running at the moment. We are currently trying to reach someone responsible there for trouble shooting.

We are really sorry for any inconveniences and do our best to find a fast solution.

As soon as the problems are fixed, you’ll get informed.

Last weekend, a new version of FACES was released on the live server. This was a GUI (Graphical User Interface) release.  That means that the layout of FACES has changed dramatically. The aim of this release was to make the navigation within and also the work with FACES more user friendly. Further on, the layout was adapted to the layout of other eSciDoc solutions like PubMan. Additionally, some minor bugs have been fixed in this release, too.

Album List

One major change is that there is now only one album list instead of two (published albums and private albums). This list displays all albums accessible to the user: all albums created by the individual user (identified via the user account) irrespective of their state (private, published, or withdrawn) and all albums published by FACES users. Further on, the album list can be filtered for following criteria: all albums, all public albums, my albums, my public albums, my private albums, and my withdrawn albums. Therfore the user can decide by himself, which albums shall be displayed in the list.

If the user is not logged in, this list contains only all published albums.

Please feel free to give us feedback about the new look of FACES via the comments link below this blog entry.

Due to a technical release, which is currently scheduled for the upcoming Friday, February 12th 2010 we have to shut down the FACES server from Friday early morning probably until Monday, February 15th 2010 in the late evening. That long downtime is required because the release contains far-reaching technical changes. The new release will not bring much changes for the usage of FACES, but a lot of technical issues in the background have been modified and you will see a new, user-friendlier design .

Thanks for your understanding!

Due to maintenance issues (more) Faces will be down on Friday, 11th of December.

We apologize for any inconveniences.

Yesterday evening, we released a new Faces Version (3.2) on the live server. For the users there will be hardly any changes visible, but in some points the layout has changed a bit. Further on, several minor bugs are fixed now.
The really new functionality is the link in the meta menu “Download Collection”, where you can download all pictures of FACES in one step. But please be aware that the download can take up to 20 minutes, the file is about 3,5 GB big. This link is only a workaround as at the moment it is not possible to download more than 800 pictures in a single step. But we are already working on that problem and hope to fix it with one of the next releases.

The concept behind this release was to generalize the FACES software so that it can be reused to manage all sort of pictures together with their metadata. This generalization works, so that now other organizations can use the software as well.

We have to do some maintenance issues with Faces during this night (14.10.-15.10.09). Therefore it could happen that from today 18:00 till tomorrow morning 10:00 some pictures within FACES will not be available for a short time. We apologize for any inconveniences.