Roy Tennant

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Moving Beyond CaptureThe IT Perspective

• Roy Tennant
• The California Digital Libraryescholarship.cdli
  b.org/rtennant/presentations/2004sfs/

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• Having the Right Gear
• Making the Right Decisions
• Luck!

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Outline

• The Importance of Metadata
• Platforms
• Databases Pick Your Poison
• A Brief Demonstration
• Your New Best Friend
• I Know This Much Is True

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The Importance of Metadata

• Metadata structured information about an object
  or collection of objects
• No matter what access system you use, having the
  right metadata is essential
• The services you want to offer will define the
  metadata you must capture
• The storage format is not that important as long
  as you lose nothing and you can output it in all
  the ways you wish to support
• Capturing it at the correct granularity is key

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Metadata Granularity

• The degree to which you segment or chop up your
  metadata
• Gross John Doe
• Fine John Doeamily

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Item v. Collection Metadata

• Collection-level metadata
• Discovery metadata describes the collection
• Example Kentuckiana Digital Library see
  www.kyvl.org/kentuckiana/digilibcoll/digilibcoll.s
  html
• Item-level metadata
• Discovery metadata describes the item
• Example MARC or Dublin Core records for each
  item see californiadigitallibrary.org
• Both types may be appropriate
• Doing both often takes very little extra effort

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dgilib.kyvl.org
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californiadigitallibrary.org
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Platforms
Data
Application Software
Operating System
Hardware
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Platforms
Data
Application Software
SystemAdministratoror Service Provider
Operating System
Hardware
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Platforms
Data
Databasesoftware
Application Software
Operating System
Hardware
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Databases Pick Your Poison

• Virtually any database or indexing product will
  in most cases work
• Key considerations
• What do you already have (in-house or via a
  service provider)?
• Which platform are you on?
• Which product will your IT staff or service
  provider be willing to support?
• What do you want your users to be able to do?
• How much money do you have to spend?

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Databases Examples

• Targeted to the market and purpose e.g.,
  CONTENTdm from OCLC
• General purpose commercial e.g., Oracle, Sybase,
  SQL Server
• General purpose open source e.g., MySQL, SWISH-E
• Shrink-wrapped consumer e.g., MS Access,
  Filemaker Pro

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Database Indexing Sofware

• Sample Indexing Systems/Databases
• Sprite (Perl module)
• Microsoft Access, Filemaker Pro
• SWISH-E, swish-e.org
• MySQL, mysql.com
• ContentDM, OCLC
• Oracle or Sybase

Access/Filemaker
Oracle, Sybase
MySQL/ContentDM
SWISH-E
Sprite
Less
More
The power complexity continuum
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Two Brief Demonstrations

• SWISH-E Components
• A web server (Apache) and Perl
• Free SWISH-E indexing software
• An edited version of the included Perl script
• Hand-created XML files (lets do one!)
• FileMaker Pro Components
• FileMaker Pro
• Web Access Plug-in enabled

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Your New Best Friend

• Your System Administrator/Service Provider will
  be very important to you
• Definition The one person or organization upon
  whom the success of your project rests (i.e.,
  God) and, the one person or organization who can
  most easily damage your project (i.e., the Devil)
• Foster good relations
• Communicate your needs clearly, and listen well

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I Know This Much is True

• Never forget for whom you are doing this!
• Neither an early adopter nor latecomer be
• Never underestimate the power of a prototype
• Back it up or kiss it goodbye
• Computers are cheap, people are expensive
• Storage is cheaper than dirt
• Buy hardware at the last possible moment

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I Know This Much is True

• Dont buy software with a zero at the end of the
  release number
• Burn, baby, burn dont be afraid to work
  computers hard theyre just machines!
• Like love and money, you can never have too much
  RAM, disk space, or CPU speed
• All things being equal, open is better than
  proprietary
• Know your source of support going in

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I Know This Much is True

• For any given project, there are many ways it
  can succeed
• Just focus on (you guessed it) 1) having the
  right gear, and 2) making the right decisions (
  and coming here was a great start)

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Final Advice

• Start and end with your users and the services
  you wish to provide
• Digitize at the highest quality that you can, and
  save an unprocessed copy
• Capture as much metadata as you can stand and
  store it in a highly granular fashion