[Web4lib] Open Source Federated Searching Software - whatwe would need.

[David Kane]

Hi Brian and Danielle,

Thanks for your responses to this thread.

Brian, I am interested in the notion of Keystone as a 'framework'. 
Does this mean other applications like Fedora can be treated as
components of Keystone?  It certainly does sound like an exciting way of
binding together different kinds of information to create a rich
experience for the reader.  It would be interesting to find out more
from your colleague who is working Fedora into Keystone.

What does you mean when you say that Keystone makes no attempt at
preservation?  Indeed, what are the defining features of an
institutional repository?  Maybe we could develop a list of these
features:

(1) Preservation (possibly with redundancy over multiple sites)
(2) Provides and can harvest OAI-compliant resources
(3) Can differentiate between grey literature and peer-reviewed
publications (Can hold a wide variety of digital objects and supports
sophisticated searches on these resources)

Could Index Data's Keystone provide the functionality of an
Institutional repository and yet have the flexibility for libraries to
add more or change functionality in response to changing demands?

Can anyone add to or subtract from the 3 features listed above?

David Kane
WIT Libraries
http://library.wit.ie/ 
++353.51302838





David Kane
WIT Libraries
http://library.wit.ie/
++353.51302838


>>> brian at wcsu.edu 16/06/2006 16:55 >>>
In message
<45057232A4AC6444B0F9452131E7446E0391624B at exchange.win2k.tsl.state.tx.us>,
"Danielle Plumer" writes:
>David,
>

>We've found Index Data to be very good at supporting open standards. I
=
>don't know that I'd consider Keystone as an alternative to DSpace for
a =
>true institutional repository, but it's probably on a par with =
>Greenstone and streeprints.org as a digital library option.

We use both DSpace and TKL (Index Data). In my opion TKL can
definitely be used in place of DSpace. A TKL repository can be both an
OAI
service provider and can harvest OAI resources. TKL makes handling
multiple
meta types (Dublin Core, Mods, Mets, you name it) within the same
repository possible while DSpace's metadata schema is fixed (which is
fine
but maybe not what you're after). 

One of the things that's supposed to make an "institutional
repository"
different from other web applications is the need for preservation.
TKL
doesn't make any attempt at this but DSpace (as far a I can tell but I
may
be missing something) doesn't really help much in this area either.
Fedora
is much more concerned with managing bitstreams and I've heard of
people
using TKL for managing their metadata, search and presentation layers
and
using Fedora as the object store. This is something that I would like
to
investigate. 

DSpace and TKL are both applications meaning they are designed for a
particular task but I tend to look at TKL (really the tools and
components
that comprise TKL) more of a framework. You can use this framework to
build
almost any kind of application leveraging you knowledge of how TKL
works.
This is also true of DSpace in leveraging the use of Java server pages
(jsp)
and tomcat but TKL seems more flexible. TKL uses xslt, php, perl but if
I
want to write a function or component in python I can. Along with
OAI-PMH
TKL applications are Z39.50 capable. They have a federated searching
option.

While I don't claim to be any kind of expert I find the coding style of
all
the TKL components to be of high quality, clear (well as clear as my
little
brain can make of it) and well documented. They also have pretty
extensive
documentation on their web site about how things work and how to get a
site
up and running. The mailing list traffic is light but responses are
very
friendly and always useful. 

I also like the Index Data business model (I wish every vendor did
this).
Their software is open source which is great but they offer their
services
for a fee. There are lots of reasons why you might want to employ
those
services. Being selfish I'd like to see the uptake of this software
grow. A
larger community means more good stuff coming from that community
(which
helps me). I think TKL and Index Data in general deserve a bigger
community.  

--
Brian Kennison
Systems
Haas Library
Western Connecticut State University
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