 |
 |
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 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%