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Hi Mark.

 

    I need to warn you that most digital library delivery software creates dynamic web pages.  Most search engines will not index these.  I will have a short article out in Code4Lib in March about the supplemental work we did to enable our EADs to be full-text searchable.  The preliminary report is here, if you’re curious.

(http://aztec.lib.utk.edu/~deridder/writings/GooglizingDL.doc )

 

    Secondly, most digital library software delivers different types of materials differently; the way you want to present a TEI-encoded document versus a simple image versus an EAD, differs.  So commonly, types of materials are split into separate collections, though some software enables you to search across those collections for fields that are in common (subject, title, creator).  It’s difficult to find anything that provides full text searching across formats, out of the box... especially cheaply.  The more complex the system, the more you can expect to pay for it.  (Ex Libris Digitool comes to mind.  And no, the last time I checked, it was not interoperable yet with the OPAC.)

 

  If you have skilled developers, you can customize open source software such as DLXS or XTF to do most of what you are asking.  Our current solution is to put the digitized objects into the software that best displays them, create links in the EADs to the child files, and in the child files to the EADs --- and also offer full text searching of all items via another interface, that links out to the displays.  This is built in DLXS. http://dlc.lib.utk.edu/f/fa/  In addition, we are extracting MARC from the EADs to upload those, with links to the EADs, into our OPAC system.  And we have extracted MODS from the EADs for OAI records, which also link back.

 

  So to answer your last questions – generally you are going to need second “cataloging” of the child items, if you want them searchable.  If you don’t – then just throw them in a web directory, create links to them, and put those in the EAD with the metadata you are capable of entering in the altformavail tag.  Then all you have to put in a delivery software – or static html pages, if you want Google to index them – are the EADs.  If you go with static web pages, you’ll need a search engine that works over an existing website.

 

Hope this helps!

 

Jody DeRidder

Digital Library Center

University of Tennessee Libraries

Knoxville, Tenn. 37996

 

 

 


From: Encoded Archival Description List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Sandford, Mark
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2007 8:45 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Discovery software (Slightly off topic)

 

Hello everyone,

 

Please forgive me for a slightly off-topic question.  My institution is in the early stages of setting up a music archive.  It will contain a combination of physical artifacts (memorabilia, musical instruments), books and printed music, and sound recordings in various formats.   We (the library) will be pushing to have as much of the collection as possible digitized in some way--photographs of artifacts, scanning manuscripts, sound files, etc—though a lot of the music is commercially produced and cannot be made available digitally.  We hope to hire an archivist to process the collection and I intend to make the case for requiring an EAD encoded finding aid.

 

My question for the group, then, is can anyone suggest any good software that can deal well with a mix of digital content and surrogate records?  Something that will provide immediate access to digital content and an appropriate record or pointer for items that are not available online?  There’s been some talk about doing traditional library cataloging for the collection, but most of us (including me and our other cataloger) are agreed that that really does not do an archive justice, especially since it hides the records from search engines and would make searching just that archive difficult for a lone researcher who did not know our system.  We’re not yet at the point of saying we want a single piece of software for the internal processing and administration stuff as well as the public-facing discovery tool, but I tend to think if we can get something that does it all, that will make things simpler since we will not be able to have dedicated software folks to provide support.

 

Also, (more on topic) when dealing with an item-level search, how often is EAD providing the metadata?  I realize that EAD can handle item specific description.  Are many (or any) software packages using EAD as the primary mechanism for that, or do they tend to repackage the data or require a second “cataloging” of the item in the software itself, outside of EAD entirely?

 

Thanks,

 

Mark Sandford
Special Formats Cataloger
David and Lorraine Cheng Library
William Paterson University
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(973) 720-2437