Bibliographic databases on the Web & Isite, etc.

[Steve Morris]

Web4Lib'ers,

     A few months ago I started trying to figure out how to put our 9,000
plus record bibliographic database on the web.  The problem was that we
needed fielded searching and I work for a rather small library that doesn't
have a budget yet for the sort of commercial software that handles that sort
of thing (KE Texpress and DbTextWorks server come to mind).   For a server,
I got a big break when the UC Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE agreed to let
me set up shop on their server--meaning I could sidestep my original plan of
setting up a Linux server.    As for software, for my first pass at putting
the database up I decided to use SWISH, which is full text indexer, but
which I found could made to do fielded indexing by extracting the fields and
indexing them separately (a time consuming process but painless if done as a
scripted late night batch process).  I also wanted to have a navigable
thesaurus and links to author/corporate author/research sponsor indexes and
home pages, as well as online versions of papers, from within citations.
      What I've come up with is at this stage is a sort of "scotch tape and
bailing wire" solution involving a mess of Perl scripts, some odd uses of
SWISH, and a heavy emphasis on batch-produced static pages to reduce
search-time server load.   The database (topic: Intelligent Transportation
Systems) is accessible, warts and all, at:

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/~path

Now I'm trying to figure out where to take this thing next.  In the short
term, for this iteration of the database, in addition to working out
glitches, I plan to facilitate variable display modes to make batch printing
of records easier.  But for the next stage I'd like to look at something
z39.50-ish, but preferably using freeware (Isite maybe?), or less expensive
commercial software.  I've been having my e-mail filter dump ISITE-L to a
folder for the last several months until I start needing to use it and have
perused the Isite documentation a little bit but haven't really sunk my
teeth into it yet.  Anybody want to weigh in on the pro's and cons of using
Isite for small/medium/widgety bibliographic databases?

Thanks,

Steve

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Steve Morris, Technical Services Librarian
Harmer E. Davis Transportation Library
Institute of Transportation Studies, U.C. Berkeley
e-mail: smorris at library.berkeley.edu
phone: (510) 642-3604    fax: (510) 642-9180
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/ITSL/smorris.html