Could I ask for comments from ELib members on our WWW project? We
are about to buy new database software and hardware. Our datasets and
systems design relate to issues on which ELib is working.
In outline, we have been collecting meta-information on
electronic/institutional sources on Third World development and the
environment. These are abstracted, indexed, and contain postal/fax
addresses, etc. Currently the data is mastered in a PC database
(Inmagic DB Textworks) and copied as HTML pages onto our UNIX WWW
server. We offer both a browsable sequence and a WAIS index. The
records link to URL link to home pages, plus to selected pages within
the site (appearing as "highlights" on the master record).
The URL for our WWW site is:
http://www.ids.ac.uk/eldis/eldis.html
This is time consuming to manage, and we are now looking to handle
this through an Internet-accessible database and to upgrade the
performance of our server. The same database software will be used as
a user-interface for our library catalogue (100,000 UNIMARC records,
subject indexed): the software will not be used for library
housekeeping purposes. We would like, as one search option, to offer
a user-interface which searches both the library catalogue and the
meta-information directory at the same time (with other
databases being added later, the first being a UK research abstracts
dataset).
We have looked at several software packages for this, including
Inmagic Webserver and Verity Topic's Search 97.
We would also like to incorporate automatically generated WWW indexes
into the dataset (by targetting a robot using a selection of URLs
from our manually created meta-database). Again, we would like to
offer the possibility of a serach interface linking this dataset with
other datasets.
And the datasets themselves might be of interest to other research
projects (subject indexed MARC from a subject-focused collection and
value-added meta data records on that subject). We would be
interested in cooperation or in keeping to standards which would
facilitate this.
We have an outline document which discusses the design issues in more
detail:
http://www.ids.ac.uk/eldis/ideas.html
I guess the questions we are looking at are:
(a) which software/hardware combination should we use?
and
(b) are there standards which we should work to which would make the
dataset of interest to Elib?
[and yes, we are working on a new logo design which will not conflict
with the Earl Project's design!]
Peter Ferguson
ELDIS Project Manager
British Library for Development Studies
Institute of Development Studies
at the University of Sussex
Falmer
Brighton BN1 9RE
UK
email: [log in to unmask]
fax: +44 (0)1273 621202
telephone: +44 (0)1273 606261
WWW: http://www.ids.ac.uk/eldis/eldis.html
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