Just curious, did you use Hydra for this project, or just straight
Blacklight without Hydra?
Esp if not Hydra, what tools did you end up using for indexing your
content into Solr? (Only SolrMarc, all your content was already avail in
Marc?)
On 12/11/2012 11:10 AM, Levy, Michael wrote:
> I posted the message below on the Blacklight Development group, and I was
> encouraged to share with code4lib, so I'm reposting with some minor edits:
>
> I'd like to share a Blacklight implementation at the United States
> Holocaust Memorial Museum that is available at
> http://collections.ushmm.org/search It's been in use in-house for about a
> year, with constant improvements and additions.
>
> First, a tremendous thanks and kudos to all of the people involved in the
> Blacklight project. I'm so grateful to everyone who worked on the project
> and to those who have helped me with Blacklight, Ruby on Rails, and
> SolrMarc.
>
> The various collecting units at the Museum use very different fields,
> labels, vocabularies, and spellings. I had a lot of fun mapping them and
> thinking about what sorts of fields might work together for searching. The
> catalog records sources include: a commercial ILS; a commercial collections
> management system; two completely custom desktop database applications; a
> spreadsheet; and a custom MSSQL database application. In addition, we have
> a system that manages digitized assets that supplies some data.
>
> Selecting a project based on Ruby on Rails came at a cost, including the
> learning curve involved with RoR and, moreso, due to the process of having
> RoR established with our IT infrastructure group. (Thanks go to our IT
> group as well!)
>
> I looked at some other really fine open source projects as well as
> commercial products. Blacklight seemed optimal for our case because it
> easily deals with any kind of metadata sources and it was a mature system
> with a vibrant user/developer community.
>
> I'll highlight a few interesting features.
>
> Our collections management system supports relationships between records
> including parent/child type relationships, e.g. between collection and the
> items that comprise it. Here is a collection that has one archival
> (document) collection plus several objects:
> http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn508676
> We also have another parent/child type of relationship, where a group at
> the Museum catalogs victim or survivor lists. I could import those, and
> because there's enough metadata to link to the archival collection they are
> part of, I can link them together. For example, this archival collection
> http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn508286 is linked to a number
> of names source catalog records at the bottom, and each of those is linked
> to the archival record as its source. These are done by doing a separate
> Solr search for each item to see whether it's got a parent or children to
> display near the bottom of the record.
>
> Many years ago the Museum developed a geographic database. One area where
> the various collecting units catalog disparately is in location naming. I
> simply turned the names into a Solr synonyms file and then I highlight the
> snippets in the index/list view. So that way, if you searched for L'viv and
> you got a hit on Lemberg or Lwow or L'vov, you'd know why you got it. Same
> with Munich, München, Muenchen, Munchen, and for Lodz/Litzmannstadt. (Some
> day would be nice to have the name expansion be switchable on or off.)
>
> Thumbnail (and larger) images from the archival records and objects come
> from the collections management system for the Museum objects. Also finding
> aids for archival ("Document") records are currently managed in the CMS
> system as doc, docx, or xls files and are delivered through Blacklight on
> the detail page. For the photos and the historical film, the thumbnails
> come from other sources based on the two custom desktop databases mentioned
> above.
>
> We have thousands of hours of oral history testimony in many languages
> viewable from the Blacklight detail page as mp4 or mp3 files. The easiest
> way to get to those is by limiting Record Type to Oral History, and Online
> to "Yes":
> http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog?f[di_available][]=Yes&f[record_type_facet][]=Oral+History
>
> I welcome feedback regarding the user interface, bug reports, and any other
> ideas you have, on the list or offline. (Plus I hope to meet some of you at
> code4lib 2013.)
>
> Cheers!
>
>
