end-user access
Harald Hille
I'm an alumnus of a university choral group that has existed for nearly 70 years, given hundreds of concerts, gone on tours and issued recordings, etc. We have accumulated an archive of documents (some 5-6 pages long), photos, programs, posters, letters, recordings, etc., which ultimately we plan to give to the university for their archives. But, before that happens, I have been asked (with my rather primitive IT experience) to digitize (scan as PDFs) the items we have and to try to develop a system that would allow current members and alumni to retrieve (display/consult) items corresponding to the criteria/tags that they have selected through a user interface (front-end) to the search engine (back-end). Ideally the system would reside on the group's website and would be usable by any outside user from his/her browser. Looking at the descriptions on your website, DSpace seems to allow many of these functions (and more), but what is not fully explicit is whether a user can come in and use the system from his/her laptop without having to have installed DSpace on his/her PC.
Is DSpace appropriate for such a task (rather like a library's online public access catalog)?
Susanna Mornati 4Science
Il giorno martedì 16 giugno 2020 16:33:00 UTC+2, Harald Hille ha scritto:
I'm an alumnus of a university choral group that has existed for nearly 70 years, given hundreds of concerts, gone on tours and issued recordings, etc. We have accumulated an archive of documents (some 5-6 pages long), photos, programs, posters, letters, recordings, etc., which ultimately we plan to give to the university for their archives. But, before that happens, I have been asked (with my rather primitive IT experience) to digitize (scan as PDFs) the items we have and to try to develop a system that would allow current members and alumni to retrieve (display/consult) items corresponding to the criteria/tags that they have selected through a user interface (front-end) to the search engine (back-end). Ideally the system would reside on the group's website and would be usable by any outside user from his/her browser. Looking at the descriptions on your website, DSpace seems to allow many of these functions (and more), but what is not fully explicit is whether a user can come in and use the system from his/her laptop without having to have installed DSpace on his/her PC.
Is DSpace appropriate for such a task (rather like a library's online public access catalog)?
Mark H. Wood
any "client" software of its own installed anywhere. The only
absolute requirements for the end-user are some sort of computer with
a graphic display and a web browser.
DSpace just serves up whatever is deposited in it, as-is, so if you
deposit PDFs then users need some way to display PDF documents. Most
contemporary browsers integrate some sort of PDF viewer, and there are
a number of others available.
Installing DSpace is a process of many steps, but not all that
difficult.
https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSDOC6x/Installing+DSpace
Regardless of what platform you choose, I'd advise you to spend some
time sooner than later, thinking about the nature of your documents
and how people will try to find them. The value of a platform like
DSpace is largely in the ability to add detailed description to each
document and make those "metadata" available for searching.
You have several different classes of documents (text, images,
recordings) which you might describe with different sets of
properties. People who deal in these matters regularly have developed
a number of metadata vocabularies for describing different types of
documents. You may want to talk this over with your university's
librarians -- they should be familiar with these matters and may be
able to guide you in choosing how you will describe your materials in
ways that work well and will fit into their existing systems.
If you do choose DSpace, it comes with a small set of vocabularies
("schemas") which are well suited to texts and do work with other
media. But if you want something specialized to another media type,
there are folks here who can help you add new schemas to your DSpace
instance.
--
Mark H. Wood
Lead Technology Analyst
University Library
Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis
755 W. Michigan Street
Indianapolis, IN 46202
317-274-0749
www.ulib.iupui.edu
Harald Hille
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Chris Clawson
Mark H. Wood
> One basic question is still unresolved. What are the system requirements
> for installing DSpace? Do they include, for instance a server running Linux
> (or Ubuntu)?
> Our singing group has no formal link to the university, and I suspect that
> they wouldn't be interested in letting us use one of their servers (which
> may well run under Linux).
> So, we will probably have available only something like a relatively
> ordinary (could be heavy-duty) desktop (Windows) in some member's house, I
> suspect that won't do it for DSpace.
> We might have to settle for something much simpler, although I'm not sure
> what.
have no experience with that setup. Others here may be able to advise
you about things specific to running on Windows. (I run on Gentoo
Linux everywhere, because it suits the way I think about system
administration, but to each his own.)
You'll need a machine with enough storage for your materials plus a
bit. You'll need a machine with enough memory to run Tomcat (not very
large in itself), DSpace (several gigabytes), Solr (for indexing, more
gigabytes), and a database (probably PostgreSQL, since it's free while
Oracle isn't free for production use).
At work I have all of that running on my office workstation, plus
Apache HTTPD (optional), with typically half a dozen DSpace instances
(plus their Solr instances) in various stages of development, loaded
concurrently. The hardware is an all-in-one desktop box which has
about 512GB storage (not much of this devoted to my test DSpace
instances) and 16GB of memory. It sometimes feels a bit small, with
all that running.
Our four moderately busy production DSpace instances actually run in a
bit less memory (three in one 6GB server-grade box and one in another
at 10GB), but a single DBMS instance runs in a separate 4GB box to
serve all of them.
If you don't expect a lot of traffic to your site, I'll go out on a
limb and say that I would expect okay performance from a desktop box
with 4-8GB memory. Storage size will depend on the total size of the
materials you want to serve up, but I think it would be hard to find a
recent PC that had too little. (I should say here that I'm a
cheapskate and tend to size systems on the low side. I hope that
someone else will chime in with another estimate.)
That's just a starting point. It's difficult to give hard-and-fast
numbers for provisioning a new site. One typically starts with a
reasonable estimate and then keeps an eye on performance to see
whether more capacity is needed, and if so, what one is running out
of.