JISCMail - ADLIB-USERS Archives

Some thoughts from me, although I suspect others will have more directly useful experience.

I believe IWM deliver files to their ecommerce platform from their Adlib API, but I believe there is a Drupal layer in between. We're in the process of scoping an e-commerce platform which will also take metadata and files from our Adlib API, but will probably load to a Drupal layer first. (Web teams often prefer that middle CMS layer rather than relying on direct, unmediated API calls.)

You're not using a Drupal or Wordpress layer to build your online catalogue, but using the Adlib web server directly?

Do you store the high resolution files online (ie, in a networked server environment), alongside your thumbnails? If you do, you could make those hires images available to your Adlib API, and deliver them - based on user request in your Adlib interface - to an E-Commerce shopping cart platform, to take payment and manage the customer delivery. I think there are reasonably priced E-Commerce products available, which you could integrate with your Adlib API, and it wouldn't be too difficult to build a trigger in your Adlib online catalogue, to activate an online ecommerce platform and deliver the relevant file to that platform.

The key thing in making a solution like that scaleable is, I think, establishing a solid link between your thumbnail and the corresponding hires file, so that the customer when viewing the thumbnail can trigger access to the corresponding hires. Maybe they have identical filenames but are stored in separate directories? Or maybe the filenames are identical other than the file extension, jpg / TIFF?

In our Adlib web applications, we make use of the Adlib API image scaling function, so we store as hires and the API delivers the thumbnails by scaling down on demand, with those thumbnails cached for future use. That method means the access to the hires is just a matter of asking for the image unscaled rather than scaled down, in theAPI call. So that's one way to achieve it, and it has other benefits.

Hopefully other users here have experience of integrating 3rd party Ecommerce stuff with their Adlib API, so more directly useful advice Pamela.

On 26 Nov 2013, at 12:39, Pamela Birch <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hello everyone,

Like many archives we are currently investigating ways of making money from our material and trying to weigh up whether we try to do something inhouse or externally hosted. One of the things that sprang to mind was that since we already run an online catalogue via Adlib (which is soon to get a long awaited upgrade) was there any way to tie in a purchase system with it. For example, we already display low grade images on the OPAC and then people have to contact us to buy a hi-res version, is there any easy way to enable them to go from the low res thumbnail through a shopping cart to enable downloading of the hi-res without having to contact us?

Is anyone doing or experimenting with such a thing or have you considered it and rejected it?

Any thoughts on the issue gratefully received.

Regards

Pamela Birch
Conservator/Premises & Projects Officer

Bedfordshire & Luton Archives & Records Service
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