[Web4lib] managing digital resources

[Gilman, Mark]

Joe,
 
Another option, which would be relatively quick and easy:
 
1) Install Joomla 
2) Install a document management extesion like
 
DocMan
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/82/details
 
or 
 
Remository
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/directory-&-documentation/downlo
ads/83/details
 
Let Joomla handle the user authentication and set it so that folks can't
see the menu link to the document store unless they are logged in. The
plugins let you add all kinds of 
metadata, create categories, etc. In most situations, someone would need
to log in to the back end of Joomla to "publish" any news documents that
have been uploaded by
your users, but you could create those roles for others, so that burden
would not fall on you exclusively. I'm not sure how well this solution
would scale if you were to grow the collection dramatically, but my
sense is that 3,000 or so documents should be okay. Perhaps others could
comment on this idea if there are obvious flaws.
 
I'm pretty sure that DocMan used to exist as a standalone product, and
not just a Joomla extension, but it seems to have disappeared in that
format. (I, at least, have been unable to find it on SourceForge or
elsewhere.) 
 
Regards,
Mark Gilman
 
Municipal Reference Librarian / Web Design Team
Urban Information Center
Dallas Public Library
1515 Young St., 6th floor.
Dallas, TX 75201
214-670-1482
http://dallaslibrary.org/cgi/cui.htm
 
--------------------
 
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2009 10:00:14 -0600
From: "Joe Morgan" <jsmapr1 at gmail.com>
Subject: [Web4lib] managing digital resources
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
 
Hi everyone, here's a question. I work for a small departmental library
(limnology to be exact). We have a collection of electronic reprint
(about 3000 and growing) that are currently only accessible when on the
home network. This field requires a lot of field work, so this is a big
problem. I'm trying to find a way to make these digital documents (and
eventually photos, data sets and so on) available on the web. Since a
lot of this is protected information it has to be secure. I was thinking
about setting up a digital library (greenstone or fedora commons) but I
wasn't sure if this would be overkill. Does anyone have any suggestions
on the best way to approach this? Would either of these tools be digital
libraries be better or worse suited for the task. The budget is
approximately zero. And the staffing is pretty limited.
 
thanks
 
Joe Morgan
 
Center for Limnology Library
University of Wisconsin-Madison
680 North Park Street
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4439