What about something from the archives/museums world? Something like
CollectiveAccess or even Omeka?
John

On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 11:45 AM, Owen Stephens <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On 3 Aug 2012, at 15:56, Joseph Montibello <
> [log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > search, you could probably do worse than to install Blacklight.  It
> > probably doesn't really meet the "simple" criteria - there's a lot more
> to
> > it than I could talk about.  But getting it out of the box, turned on,
> and
> > searching against a few records is something that you and students could
> > probably manage. I've got a year of unix/ssh/command line experience and
> > with a bit of mucking about, googling, and asking for help I was able to
> > get a local (non-production) instance up and running, so it's definitely
> > easy enough.
>
> I'd agree - either Blacklight http://projectblacklight.org or VuFind
> http://vufind.org are straightforward to get running. I've found
> Blacklight setup using the Ruby Gem very easy both on Windows and OS X.
> Since they are both powered by Solr and use SolrMARC there are a lot of
> similarities on the indexing/searching side. However on the interface side
> they differ in terms of setup - so it might be this that would sway you one
> way of the other (or a preference for PHP (VuFind) or Ruby (Blacklight)).
>
>
>
> >>
> >> Lesson: Interfaces, usability, accessibility
> >> Exercise: Use the OPAC, populate it with some data, assess its usability
>
> Once you've got VuFind/Blacklight setup populating with data is a matter
> of uploading some MARC21 records - Blacklight comes with some test records
> bundled, I suspect VuFind does to but can't remember
>
> >>
> >> Lesson: HTML/CSS
> >> Exercise: Use CSS to skin the OPAC, customize the HTML for your "site"
>
> This is slightly more complex I guess - both systems can be highly
> customised, but in either case it isn't necessarily just a matter of
> editing CSS or HTML. Both use templating systems and both have
> configuration files that control certain aspects of the interface (e.g.
> what is searched, how facets display). CSS is probably more straightforward
> - VuFind you can just drop in CSS to override the default - not sure about
> Blacklight
>
> >>
> >> Lesson: Data management, search, IR
> >> Exercise: See if we can peak under the hood about how the OPAC's search
> >> works
> >>
>
> I think this would be the real strength of using Blacklight/VuFind -
> Solr/Lucene is a powerful combination, and used widely outside the library
> sector. You can also configure the indexing to a high degree - lots of
> options, the most basic of which I explore in
> http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_ideas/2012/07/marc-and-solrmarc/
>
> The thing I really like about this is students would see some of the
> complexity of MARC as well as some of it's utility - and where it doesn't
> work well
>
> >> Lesson: Interfaces to data: databases, XML, SQL
> >> Exercise: Use the OPAC as an living example to work with those
> interfaces
>
> This is less well served by Blacklight/VuFind - no database, no SQL.
>
> >>
> >> This idea primarily came from trying to get some simple XML/SQL
> >> exercises that didn't suck (the setup for these environments is almost
> >> as involved as any exercises itself), and the fact the previous classes
> >> really liked dissecting the nextgen catalogs we've explored from a
> >> software selection and 2.0 integration perspective.
>
> Unfortunately it may be that Blacklight/VuFind don't work for your
> scenario because they don't provide an environment for SQL. You could do
> some XML stuff (there is configuration files, and Solr can be updated via
> XML messages) - but I'm not clear whether this is the kind of XML work you
> want. However, I do think they open up some other avenues that are well
> worth exploring, and use technologies that are going to become more
> relevant in the future.
>
> Another option might be BibServer, which uses elastic search rather than
> Solr - but I've never tried installing it
> http://bibserver.readthedocs.org/en/latest/install.html
>