On Fri, 26 Jun 2009, Derik Badman wrote:

> Is anyone aware of any open source programs for managing public access to
> databases? That is, something with browse, search, subjects, etc. for
> inclusion in a library website.
>
> I'm having trouble searching for such a thing, as I'm not even sure what it
> would be called (ERM does not seem to bring up the public side of e-resource
> management).

I'm not sure what exactly you're asking for.

The generic term for database frontends without much application-specific 
logic in them are 'CRUD applications', but that assumes more than just 
read-only access. (CRUD == Create, Read, Update, Delete).

Other terms to use in searching are 'MVC framework' (and insert whatever 
programming language you're most comfortable in).

...

If you're asking for something that handles the access to multiple 
discrete databases, I'm not sure what the various terms are used in 
libraries.  We refer to 'federated search' in the science informatics, but 
that makes an assumption that you're normalizing the records to create a 
unified result set.

I think that the XC project is going to handle some aspects of this, and 
their FAQ seems to suggest it, too:

 	http://www.extensiblecatalog.org/faq#n510

... but I don't know how close to complete the features that you might 
want are currently.  (but they'd probably welcome the help).

...

You might also look through the OSS4LIB website:

 	http://oss4lib.org/

-Joe