cold
Caltech Library maintains a list of people, groups and funders and their related identifiers. For many years these were managed using a spreadsheets. That has become cumbersome. COLD manages data as JSON objects in dataset collections.
COLD is implemented as three web web services
- cold web UI
- cold JSON API (provided by datasetd)
- cold reports (the report request system)
Reports are implemented as a set of programs or bash scripts.
TypeScript+Deno is used to implement the web UI and report system.
The JSON API is provided by Dataset's datasetd.
Access control is provided by the front end web server integrated with Shibboleth.
Release Notes
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version: 0.0.49
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status: active
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released: 2026-06-05
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Collaborator Affiliations Report: restructured to one row per (coauthor, affiliation, CaltechAUTHORS record); added Acknowledgements and Additional Information columns sourced from metadata.additional_descriptions.
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Country Collaboration Report: added acknowledgements and additional_information columns sourced from metadata.additional_descriptions.
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Bug fix: publications_by_person_identifiers now reads acknowledgements from metadata.additional_descriptions (type "Acknowledgement") instead of the deprecated metadata.acknowledgements field, which is no longer reliably populated by CaltechAUTHORS.
Previous release
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version: 0.0.48
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status: superseded
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released: 2026-05-28
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Country Collaboration Report: new mediated report that lists all CaltechAUTHORS records where a creator, contributor, or funder is affiliated with an organization in a given country (matched via ROR). Staff pick the country by common English name from a type-ahead list rather than typing an ISO code.
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Country list auto-generated from ROR data: ror_import now writes htdocs/data/country_list.json after each ROR dump import, keeping the country picker in sync with the dataset.
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Collaborator Affiliations Report: new mediated report generating a CSV of collaborator affiliations suitable for NSF, including ROR-based affiliation details for each collaborator.
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ROR importer updated to use dataset load for significantly faster bulk import.
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Bug fix: the report runner was treating any stderr output as a fatal error. Commands that write progress messages to stderr (such as the country collaboration report) would produce an error string instead of a CSV. The runner now checks exit code only.
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Bug fix: on command failure, the error string was being written to the report file and the report status was incorrectly set to "completed". Errors now set status to "error" and no file is written.
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Report descriptions page (report_descriptions.html) updated to document all current reports including the three new mediated reports.
Authors
Contributors
- Johnson, Kathy
- Morrell, Thomas E
Maintainers
Software Requirements
- Deno >= 2.7.14
- Dataset >= 2.4.0
- yq (mikefarah/yq) >= 4.44
Software Suggestions
Related resources
