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Below is some text I wrote outlining the technical infrastructure for at thing we colloquially call the "catholic portal" (www.catholicresearch.net). Does the infrastructure make sense to y'all? If it doesn't make sense to you, then it won't make sense to non-technoweenies. Catholic Research Resources Initiative and its technical infrastructure This text outlines the proposed technical infrastructure for the Catholic Research Resources Initiative (CRRI). The infrastructure begins with two assumptions. First, from the user's point of view, the system provides a searchable/browsable interface to sets of EAD (Encoded Archival Document) files. Second, the system makes every effort to provide this interface through well- established Web-based protocols thus making the underlying components more modular. Figure 1 illustrates the proposal. Starting on the far left are sets of EAD files. These files will be created remotely at partner institutions and sent to a central location. Once received metadata will be extracted and stored in a relational database along with the entire EAD files. This metadata, in combination with a simple faceted classification system, will provide a way to maintain and logically organize the CRRI content. We propose to use MySQL as the relational database and a set of object-oriented Perl modules called MyLibrary to facilitate input/output against the database. [1, 2] To facilitate search, a report will be written against the database and given to an indexing program. The indexer/search engine is expected to support fielded, free-text, and full-text searching, as well as relevancy ranking. More importantly, the search engine is expected to be accessible through a Web Services-based protocol called SRU (Search-Retrieve via URL). [3] This will enable other information services to search the CRRI without using the CRRI website. Examples of other information services include metasearch interfaces now common in libraries. The use of SRU will also enable the CRRI to exchange its underlying indexing program without changing the user interface. We plan to use either Zebra, Kinosearch, or Lucene as our indexing program. [4, 5, 6] To facilitate browse the increasingly popular "faceted navigation" technique will be employed. Using the metadata contained in the EAD files, very broad "facets" will be created. Examples include subjects, formats, people, institutions, themes, and maybe dates. Each facet will have associated with it sets of "terms" such as African Americans, letters, Dorothy Day, Seton Hall University, or Catholic Social Action. Through a second set of reports, these facet/ term combinations will be displayed in a user's browser, and by selecting them relevant content will be returned. To broaden access to the CRRI's content, a third set of reports will be written against the database to enable OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting). [7] These reports will result in the creation of sets of XML files saved to the computer's file system. An OAI "data repository" application will provide access to the files and enable OAI "service providers" to read the metadata and use it in other applications. We plan to use XMLFile for the data repository. [8] An example of a service provider is OAIster. [9] Links 1. MySQL - http://mysql.com 2. MyLibrary - http://dewey.library.nd.edu/mylibrary 3. SRU - http://loc.gov/standards/sru 4. Zebra - http://indexdata.dk/zebra 5. Kinosearch - http://rectangular.com/kinosearch 6. Lucene - http://lucene.apache.org 7. OAI-PMH - http://openarchives.org 8. XMLFile - http://www.dlib.vt.edu/projects/OAI/software/xmlfile 9. OAIster - http://oaister.org -- Eric Lease Morgan University Libraries of Notre Dame