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