Vernon CMS

[Greg]

Hi,

I'm building a site for a gallery which uses Vernon to manage their
collections, and I had heard rumours that Glamkit was going to somehow
integrate with Vernon's web services for online collection viewing.

I can't see any mention of Vernon on the Glamkit site, so does anyone
know if any Vernon-related functionality is in the pipeline?

Cheers,
Greg


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[Greg Turner]

Hi other Greg,

You're well-connected indeed! We have built a front-end collection
search for the Art Gallery of NSW, who have their collection database
in Vernon. We do have plans to include it as a component of GLAMkit,
but it's not quite in a fit state to do so.

Our approach has been to put Vernon's normalised XML feed into MongoDB
- that's Arworks, Artists, Locations. We then run a script which
builds search, sort and facet indexes from the data. At the moment,
the site builds the facet tree (with counts) in realtime for each
query (and then caches it), but we are looking at ways of speeding
that up.

The advantage of using Mongo is a) scalability and b) agnosticism
about where the original data came from, meaning improved reusability
- we're using a very similar approach for the National Film and Sound
Archive, which has its collection in a different system.

Also on the todo list for AGNSW is an advanced search interface, a
couple more options in simple search, and Vernon Live Messenger
connection. The first two should appear in the next few weeks; the
live messenger some time afterwards.

However, since you've expressed interest, I'll expedite the process of
open-sourcing. I expect anything we release at this stage will need a
decent bit of tweaking and/or generalisation before it can be used for
other Vernon databases. Is there anything in particular you'd like to
work on or contribute or request?

Greg.

PS The Vernon boys have also expressed interest in building an eHive
component for GLAMkit! More than that I cannot say.

[Justin Maynard]

I don't have an imediate need but whould like to add my support for
any glamkit Vernon connection as we run Vernon here and geting our
collection online is an up and coming project.

[Greg Brown]

Hi Greg,

Thanks for your response - I'm yet to fully get my head around how the Vernon integration will work for our project, so I'm not sure exactly how it'll look. I had imagined just using an SQL database for the Vernon-sourced data along with the rest of the site's data. MongoDB looks like a good option though.

Thanks also for your offer re open sourcing. I'll be very interested to see your code. Once I'm a bit further into our project and a bit more familiar with Glamkit, I'm sure I'll have some contributions and/or suggestions.

Cheers,

Greg

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http://gregbrown.co.nz/