2. Roy Tennant The California Digital Library escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/presentations/2005 sfs/ Moving Beyond Capture The IT Perspective

3. 1. Having the Right Gear 2. Making the Right Decisions 3. Luck!

4. The Importance of Metadata Platforms Databases: Pick Your Poison A Brief Demonstration Your New Best Friend I Know This Much Is True Outline

5. The Importance of Metadata Metadata: structured information about an object or collection of objects No matter what access system you use, having the right metadata is essential The services you want to offer will define the metadata you must capture The storage format is not that important as long as you lose nothing and you can output it in all the ways you wish to support Capturing it at the correct granularity is key

6. Metadata Granularity The degree to which you segment or “chop up” your metadata Gross: John Doe Fine: John Doe

7. Item v. Collection Metadata Collection-level metadata: Discovery metadata describes the collection Example: Kentuckiana Digital Library; see www.kyvl.org/kentuckiana/digilibcoll/digilibcoll.shtml Item-level metadata: Discovery metadata describes the item Example: MARC or Dublin Core records for each item; see californiadigitallibrary.org Both types may be appropriate Doing both often takes very little extra effort

8. dgilib.kyvl.org

9. californiadigitallibrary.org

10. Platforms Hardware Operating System Application Software Application Software Data

11. Platforms Hardware Operating System Application Software Application Software Data System Administrator or Service Provider

12. Platforms Hardware Operating System Application Software Application Software Data Database software

13. Databases: Pick Your Poison Virtually any database or indexing product will in most cases work Key considerations: What do you already have (in-house or via a service provider)? Which platform are you on? Which product will your IT staff or service provider be willing to support? What do you want your users to be able to do? How much money do you have to spend?

14. Databases: Examples Targeted to the market and purpose; e.g., CONTENTdm from OCLC General purpose commercial; e.g., Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server General purpose open source; e.g., MySQL, SWISH-E Shrink-wrapped consumer; e.g., MS Access, Filemaker Pro

15. Database & Indexing Sofware Sample Indexing Systems/Databases: Sprite (Perl module) Microsoft Access, Filemaker Pro SWISH-E, swish-e.org MySQL, mysql.com ContentDM, OCLC Oracle or Sybase LessMore The power & complexity continuum Sprite SWISH-E MySQL/ ContentDM Access/ Filemaker Oracle, Sybase

16. Two Brief Demonstrations… SWISH-E Components: A web server (Apache) and Perl Free SWISH-E indexing software An edited version of the included Perl script Hand-created XML files (let’s do one!) FileMaker Pro Components: FileMaker Pro Web Access Plug-in enabled

17. Your New Best Friend Your System Administrator/Service Provider will be very important to you Definition: The one person or organization upon whom the success of your project rests (i.e., God); and, the one person or organization who can most easily damage your project (i.e., the Devil) Foster good relations Communicate your needs clearly, and listen well

18. I Know This Much is True Never forget for whom you are doing this! Neither an early adopter nor latecomer be Never underestimate the power of a prototype Back it up or kiss it goodbye Computers are cheap, people are expensive Storage is cheaper than dirt Buy hardware at the last possible moment

19. I Know This Much is True Don’t buy software with a zero at the end of the release number Like love and money, you can never have too much RAM, disk space, or CPU speed All things being equal, open is better than proprietary Know your source of support going in

20. I Know This Much is True For any given project, there are many ways it can succeed Just focus on (you guessed it): 1) having the right gear, and 2) making the right decisions ( and coming here was a great start)

21. Final Advice Start and end with your users and the services you wish to provide Digitize at the highest quality that you can, and save an unprocessed copy Capture as much metadata as you can stand and store it in a highly granular fashion Have fun!