staff-maintained indexes and databases

[Robert Sullivan]

> Our staff index a lot of local genealogy information (obituaries,
> marriages/divorces, etc) and we make that information available online as
> searchable databases (really they are just tables). In the past we have been
> using Greenstone, but would like to explore other options. We are
> considering Drupal, but the Data module is currently missing a processor.
> With the limited time we have to learn/maintain this data I'm hoping for a
> more complete or streamlined solution. Some of the indexes are "finished",
> and others we update continuously as additional obituaries etc. are
> published.
>
> What solutions are you using? Obviously cost is a factor, which is one
> reason we considered Greenstone, but would be willing to pay if it were a
> reasonable price. Is anyone using their ILS for this? Any other ideas of
> ways to do this? The data is simple, as I said they are all just basic
> tables.

Our researchers find having index pages they can browse to be useful;
it also exposes the index to search engines.  Many of them arrived by
typing in a relative's name into Google, Yahoo or Bing, rather than
knowing to look in our area.

If you're not picky about formatting, a database program which can
print a report to a file should be able to generate appropriately
tagged HTML pages.  I use Visual FoxPro because some of my background
work is fairly complex.

My initial attempts presented several historical newspapers in
separate files, but that's not very convenient with a large index
(currently over 90,000 entries) so now it's one list divided
alphabetically:

<http://www.schenectadyhistory.org/vitalrecords/deaths/index.html>

-- 
Bob Sullivan
Schenectady Digital History Archive
<http://www.schenectadyhistory.org/>
Schenectady County (NY) Public Library

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2012-12-12