What a great thread! I'd agree with what Nick Poole and James Grimster
said above, and...
On 30 August 2012 11:51, Richard Light <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> We probably need to give more thought to engineering the pipework through
> which our information flows. It probably won't be too long before a typical
> cultural heritage institution is storing its core information in three or
> more places (collections management system, image management system,
> blog/UGC/social media repository), and needing to meld and deliver that
> information to a variety of platforms and audiences. Writing each
> interface by hand simply won't scale.
>
>
I think I've spent too long away from writing code because making that
actually sounds like it'd be fun (as well as useful). The trick would be
making it enough like core business - perhaps as part of a digital
preservation or collecting strategy - to justify the resources. Each
institution has different needs, but there's already a number of WordPress
plugins (for example) that deal with collections APIs or repositories, so
you might get a critical mass of tools around Nick's first 'middleware'
option. The middleware option also seems slightly more future-proof and
realistic than a grand unified system that does everything, but then I'm
probably biased by the Unix philosophy of writing programs that do one
thing and do it well, or the more recent 'do the simplest thing possible'.
Peigi - this thread started quite a while ago but if you missed the start
the archives are available via the JISCMail site - Nick's post here sums up
http://bit.ly/SVbjcm why you'd want to use a specialist Collections
Management System (as you are), tools like WordPress are just a way of
creating a user-friendly public-facing interface to them (to build on what
Mike said).
Tehmina - Neatline is very cool but still very beta (though there's a new
version coming out soon). As it's based on Omeka, documentation/library
science experience really helps people get their heads around the
underlying record model. I've got an instance set up that I'd be happy to
send logins for if you (or anyone else) wants to try it out beyond the
sandboxes Omeka and Neatline provide. I've also written something on my
experiences teaching Neatline at
http://openobjects.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/reflections-on-teaching-neatline.html
Cheers, Mia
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