Adam,
Just over a year ago, we were in a similar position to yours, and wanted both a discovery layer and a Fedora-based digital asset management system for Stanford.
We ended up adopting Blacklight for both our next generation catalog [1] and as the UI providing discovery / viewing component of our repository. To complement BL's strong searching / browsing / multi-format object viewing capabilities, we are building a Ruby-on-Rails-based repository front end application to provide the deposit / editing / object management capabilities.
This architecture and overall approach is a multi-institutional project called Hydra [2], with Stanford, University of Virginia and University of Hull being the primary contributors at this point. The app makes use of ActiveFedora [3] as the bridge between the Fedora and the Rails apps.
By our calculations, this gave us the best of three worlds--Blacklight provides a single platform both for discovery and part of our repository front end, we leverage Fedora for its asset management capabilities, and the Hydra / ActiveFedora components let us do rapid application and flexible application development for our DAM needs.
The project is still young, but all the project code is open source, and adopters/contributors/partners are welcome.
- Tom
| Tom Cramer
| Stanford University
| [log in to unmask]
[1] http://searchworks.stanford.edu
[2] www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/hydra
[3] www.yourmediashelf.com/activefedora/
On Mar 29, 2010, at 12:37 PM, Adam Wead wrote:
> Ethan,
>
> Thanks, yes, I did take a look at this. I have to pick my battles here. A discovery interface is one of the things that we could buy "off the shelf" and get a lot of good mileage out of. I'm devoted to open source and I would love nothing more than to roll our own with Blacklight, but that's more work on top of the DAM issue. I chose not to delve into the Blacklight option to save myself more time to focus on the asset manager issue, which is where I *think* I'll be having to work the most.
>
> Of course, I'm open to suggestions. Does anyone think it's easier to do your own discovery layer than a DAM? Potentially, the money we save not buying a discovery layer could go towards buying a DAM. However, the products we're looking have some really great interfaces. I think I'd be looking at an equally difficult challenge trying to emulate some of those features on my own.
>
> thoughts?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries on behalf of Ethan Gruber
> Sent: Mon 3/29/2010 3:00 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] need a plan for what to code
>
> Instead of purchasing a discovery system, I recommend using
> blacklight<http://projectblacklight.org/>
>
> Ethan
>
>
>
>
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>
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