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Practical Digital Library Tools and Techniques. Roy Tennant The Library, University of California, Berkeley. “Brown Paper Bag” Projects. Simple Inexpensive (or free) Flexible Open (not proprietary). Example: mSQL. mSQL, a free SQL package: http://www.hughes.com.au/
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Practical Digital Library Tools and Techniques Roy Tennant The Library, University of California, Berkeley
“Brown Paper Bag” Projects • Simple • Inexpensive (or free) • Flexible • Open (not proprietary)
Example: mSQL • mSQL, a free SQL package:http://www.hughes.com.au/ • INFOMINE, UC Riverside:http://lib-www.ucr.edu/
Example: Sprite • Sprite, a Perl module, see: http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/modules/by-module/Sprite/ • Good for small (no more than a couple thousand records) flat-file databases • African American Theses & Dissertations, UCB:http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/Bibliographies/bibdb.html
Sprite Architecture • A delimited file, one line per record: author::title::description::whatever…author::title::description::whatever… • The Sprite Perl module • A Perl program for the user interface
Example: Harvest • Harvest, a free Web spider:http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/harvest/ • Index of library-related electronic journals, Index Morganagus:http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/IndexMorganagus/
Example: SWISH-E & Perl • Librarians’ Index to the Internethttp://sunsite.berkeley.edu/InternetIndex/ • KidsClick!http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/KidsClick!/ • Digital Image Cataloghttp://sunsite.berkeley.edu/ImageCatalog/ • Reference Resourceshttp://sunsite.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/searchref.pl
The Pieces • SWISH-Enhancedhttp://sunsite.berkeley.edu/SWISH-E/ • In-house Perl programssee http://www.perl.com/ for more information on Perl • Records stored in individual files using Dublin Core fields and HTML META tagssee http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core
Architecture: The Record <META NAME="DC.title" CONTENT="Sesame Street Central"> <META NAME="DC.identifier" CONTENT="http://www.sesamestreet.com/sscentral/"> <META NAME="DC.description" CONTENT="A companion to the PBS television series. Includes online games, stories, print & play activities, and a behind the scenes look at how the show is made."> <META NAME="RCLS.illustrations" CONTENT="many"> <META NAME="RCLS.readinglevel" CONTENT="zero"> <META NAME="DC.subject" CONTENT="TV networks and shows”> <META NAME="RCLS.keywords" CONTENT="Sesame Street Central A companion to the PBS television series. Includes online games, stories, print & play activities, and behind the scenes look at how the show is made. TV networks and shows”>
Architecture: In-House Programs _____ User Interface Library of subroutines Maintenance Programs Perl SWISH-E Index Index records Indiv. records
The Bottom Line • Avoid needless complexityKISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid! • Free software can be as good as (or better than) commercial software • Consider migration (how will you get out?) • Consider scale (will it handle growth?) • Good ideas and the skill to make them real are the essential ingredients, not money
Recruitment Plug • The Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE wants a few good people to do interesting things • We’ll provide the infrastructure • You provide the ideas, time, and energy • See http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Admin/librarians.html for more information