Another example of a form-building tool that I found:

http://www.fabrikar.com/

This works off of a CMS called Joomla. The person who told me about it posted an example of a complex form he created using it: http://i.imgur.com/98Rmi.png

Some description for those that care:
"The blue plus buttons let users add custom entries for those elements.
The red stars you can see to the right of most of the form elements indicate that a validation is run on the input.
Most of them just make it so the user has to fill that element in form or else it won't submit, but the validation for the SSN element first checks the syntax of the entered SSN with a regular expression, and then does an AJAX call on the input element's blur event that checks the database to see whether the entered SSN is unique.
If you look at the prescriptions group at the bottom, you can barely see green/red +/- buttons on the right.
Clicking the green plus makes another 'Name and Dosage' and 'Date' element pair appear below the pair already shown, to let you add multiple entries for that group.
The group of elements in the prescription group aren't part of the main client table, but are from another table that's in a left join to the client table on a foreign key, so each group the user adds on the form will create a separate row in the joined table.
All of that can be done through Fabrik's admin interface in the Joomla back-end, however you do need to have a pretty solid HTML/JS, PHP and MySQL background to really get the most out of it."

In other news, the various reps UM has participating in NDSA working groups met with John Wilkin, the AUL of Library IT, to discuss what's going on with things. I asked if we had the ability to devote any developer/server time to building and maintaining a submission tool and database, and he said that we really do not. So I asked, but there you go.

Essentially I am of the opinion that if we are going to continue looking for a tool or tools that can do what we want, we first have to have a participating institution take ownership of the problem. If not, we should likely revert back to a simpler solution that does not require a complex submission form to be developed and a database to be maintained.

Shane Beers
Digital Preservation Librarian at the University of Michigan
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(734) 615-2686



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