Sunday, September 28, 2008

Still More Digital Library Resources

I continue to shop around, kicking the tires on content management systems for Web sites and software for digital collections libraries. I'm planning to download Drupal (digital content management for Web sites) and experiment with it. As for Digital Collection management, I'm leaning strongly toward Archon, and have downloaded and started to play with it as a tool in managing the historical society's cataloging project.

However, all this shopping is a recursive project. As I've tried to understand the tools I've selected, I keep finding more tools that also deserve a look. The essay Drupal as a digital library content management system pointed me to these interesting applications:

  • Greenstone Digital Library Software Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet or on CD-ROM....The aim of the Greenstone software is to empower users, particularly in universities, libraries, and other public service institutions, to build their own digital libraries. It requires Apache; it also has some nice features only available on the Windows version....
  • STREETPRINT.ORG, A growing community of public web archives powered by the Streetprint Engine. This package actually looks very nice, but there's no recent sign of life on the Web site, where the newest post on the forums is dated 2007.
  • ContentDM from OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing information costs. You have to email to request a quote, and it seems Windows-centric. They say the server runs on UNIX platforms, but it doesn't sound like they've tested on Linux since kernel 2.4 came out.
  • digitizationblog focuses on digitization and related activities (such as electronic publishing) in libraries, archives, and museums, and is intended to be a source of news relevant to people who manage and implement digitization projects. Even though there are several excellent sources of digitization news such as the DigiCULT Newsletter and RLG DigiNews (and this blog certainly isn't intended to replace them), there is a lack of space on the web where implementors can share ideas and useful pointers. digitizationblog is intended to fill part of this gap.
  • Welcome to the WebAPP, Web Automated Perl Portal!: WebAPP is the most fully-featured, versatile, free and open-source, flat-file Perl portal script available today! Acronym for Web Automated Perl Portal, WebAPP is easily installed on virtually any UNIX-based server. WebAPP requires no SQL backend, no PHP, only a hosting environment offering support for Perl. This seems very attractive to me because I wouldn't have to learn much new stuff, and I could get Web sites up quickly, for me and for the library project. Also, it wouldn't be vulnerable to these spam SQL-insertion attacks that have been going around lately.

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