Test driving LEDA Test driving LEDA We operate a "test drive" server at http://testdrive.law.cornell.edu/leda . It exists primarily to give you a chance to see what LEDA does before you go to the trouble and expense of your own installation. You interact with it just as any other submitter would, but your documents are not made available anywhere except on the test drive server -- and we periodically clean it out.
All transactions on the test drive server are logged, and your activities are visible to others, so exercise some (good) judgment when making up titles or authors of fictitious works, and in choosing what to put up.
To make use of the testdrive server, you'll need to request a password from us. Once you have the password you're free to try out the server's various facilities. You'll want to have some sort of document in RTF format handy to use as a test submission.
We have three reasons to run the testdrive server:
One consequence of this is that we have deliberately limited the amount of extra help and documentation on this page. Our hope is that most people will be able to use Leda easily without additional documentation or training. (We can dream, can't we?). Let us know what needs to be explained better, and what could be made easier by sending us mail with your comments and suggestions.
Leda can be thought of as three separate subsystems: a submission system that authors (or their representatives) use to publish work on the server, a review system that is used by a site administrator or library cataloger to approve works for publication or to amend and extend metadata, and a search system that is used by searchers and readers to retrieve works. The test drive system will give you a pretty good sense for how the submission and review systems operate. Test-driving the search facility is not as satisfactory because a) the test drive system isn't federated with anything else, so the collection is limited and b) the data is the sort of bogus stuff that people submit when they're using a demo.
To test the submission system, you'll need a document in RTF format to use as your test submission. Just go to the submission page, and follow the instructions you find there. Once you've submitted your document, you'll need to take on the role of a reviewer and approve your document for publication.
Every submitted document has to be "approved" by a reviewer before it is made available to the Web. This is partly a quality control measure, and partly a way of catching mistakes or abuse.. To start, look at the page listing documents that are "in limbo" -- that is, that have been submitted by authors but are waiting for review and approval. Choose yours out of the list.
You'll be taken to a screen full of metadata; you can add or change items just as if you were a reviewer or cataloger going over the data submitted by the author. You can also view the HTML and PDF versions of the documents via the links that appear at the bottom of the page. When you're satisfied with what you have put in the form, hit the "approve document" button at the top of the page.
The search system currently has two parts -- a part that allows searching of bibliographic data on your local server, and one that allows searching of aggregated data from many sites on a remote server operated by a so-called service provider. A service provider is someone who harvests metadata from Leda sites and uses it to create other services -- often services that rely on a merged set of data from many sites, like cross-site searching. The testdrive server isn't harvested by anyone right now, so only the local search option works.
Ultimately, we plan to add full-text searching.