Sphider

Sphider is a "lightweight search engine" that was created using PHP and uses MySQL as the database. It can be used for accommodating small to medium search engine functionality that can be added to your website.
Sphider does a database dump of the Sphider MySQL database. it has the ability to create searching functionality instead of browsing lots of pages.
Sphider is not full-featured, and not as comprehensive as most search engines. This searches within and across given websites.
Sphider works in a LAMP application. There is a server working behind the scenes.
When the PHP code executes, it will grab web pages from the internet and store it in MySQL.





You give it a list of sites and then it goes out and indexes it. It grabs the text from the web pages and stores it into a database.
It also gives options to fully index or to-depth indexing. This means Sphider wants to know what to do when it gets to a link. Does it keep going until there no more links, or just to depth, which is selected by the indexer?
There are some down sides to Sphider, however. You have to manually re-index the site, page linking and ranking aren’t supported by Sphider like Google and Yahoo.

WordPress

Wordpress is an open source LAMP application blogging application. It allows you to set it up on your own server. For the sake of my course requirement and public access, I created a blog using Blogger, which is also open source software that allows a user to create and modify a webspace (blog) to his or her specifications. Like Wordpress, Blogger builds on web standards, usability, and aesthetics. Both are very easy to install and easy to use.
For the installation of Wordpress, you have to create an empty database in PHPMyAdmin so that PHP can update the files when edited. You have to make sure to name the database, create a user name and password, which you’d use the same log-in and password created in LAMP.
You can download and install presentations and themes. You can also upload pictures, allow comments to be posted on your site. You can also create categories. One of the features of Blogger is that it allows you to write a page, which is unlike creating a blog entry. Blogger doesn’t allow you to create a page, but you are able to create a profile page.

XAMPP

XAMPP is "an easy to install Apache software package. XAMPP includes MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and easy to use once you get the hang of it. For my Digital Libraries class, I installed this software and purchased PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites by Larry Ullman. I followed the examples in the book and was able to create PHP pages, passing them through the MySQL database, getting some impressive results. Unfortunately there was a huge learning curve for me, and since I have SOME HTML knowledge, but not TONS, it took me a while to get the hang of it, but I did, and was rather impressed with my work!

TikiWiki

TikiWiki is a content management package, allowing multiple to add content using the web itself. Has blog, wiki, full-featured web community, open source with LAMP applications.
You have to create an empty database using PHPMyAdmin, and place the extracted files in the document root. In the installation, you have to make sure you tell it the database type, which is MySQL, configure the user name, password, and then place the database name you create in PHPMyAdmin in the Database name field.
There are many features to TikiWiki. The homepage is automatically created in basic HTML form, but does not use HTML to edit or create the page. TikiWiki has its own syntax for editing and creating pages. You can also create and search photo galleries in TikiWiki.
Click the image to enlarge the view.

Fernbank Museum's Digital Library Proposal

I've been working on this proposal since last fall, from David Lankes' IST 676 Digital Libraries course. In this course, we discussed the "evolving concept" of digital libraries from many angles: from a definition approach, technical view (designing and building a digital library), services (intermediation), and the socio-political views.

The objectives of the course were to:
a. gain an understanding of what a digital library is, and get an understanding of their emerging roles
b. become versant in digital library vocabulary
c. assess the social, economic, and technological environment that is encompassed by a digital library and the growing interest.
d. gain a knowledge and understanding of the issues, trends, and current technologies.
e. study and evaluate the major national and international digital library projects.
f. give the opportunity to plan a digital library.

One of the assignments was to define a digital library. I define a digital library as a portal for gathering and accessing primary source materials for research. These materials are typically accessed via the internet (versus a print collection) with no physical boundaries. These tend to be collections of materials that users would not normally have ready access to (could be a collection of old manuscripts or objects of artifacts).

Next, we were to create a digital library topic. I was presented with an opportunity to investigate these issues via an internship opportunity with the Fernbank Museum of Natural History as my model., I thought it would be wise to use this as my topic. I discussed the collection and the importance and value of it to researchers. At the Fernbank, Dennis and I talked about this St. Catherine's Island collection of artifacts, and developing this digital archive around it.

Next, I selected and evaluated three existing digital archives:
American Museum of Natural History Congo Exhibition, 1909-1915
Colorado Digitization Program
Digitized Library Collections (Research at the Getty)
In this evaluation, I discussed the content of each archive, its features and interface design, metadata standard and schema.

I used this evaluation to help determine the needs of our own project; how we would organize the content and what the archive's architecture would be like, and also, what kind of content would be useful to users, and how would they want to access this information.

I gained a tremendous understanding of the various angles and issues dealing with digital libraries.

Since last Fall, I've been working with Dennis Blanton of the Fernbank Museum. Our project has revolved around a collection of artifacts from St. Catherine's Island, which is in Georgia. The purpose of this project is to create a digital archive, which would become a portal for research and resources that relate to the archive and St. Catherine's Island. With the help of my class, IST 676, and conversations with Dennis, we were able to come up with a design and plan for the archive - the PROPOSAL. In this proposal, we discuss various issues like who our user base would be, choosing metadata schemes, interoperability, staffing, web design, and timeline, among other things. I also make some suggestions for open source digital library software and have been experimenting with Greenstone.