Solving Obvious Problems: A 60 Minute Digital Library
Posted on March 4, 2007 | Tags:
I have a friend who is attending graduate school and mentioned that the graduate students in his program each had collected a sizable number of different academic documents (term papers, book and article lists, obscure or important pdf journal articles) and wanted to share them together in what the librarian in me would describe as a digital “group library”. He asked me if I knew of any possible solutions. I recommended Drupal.
In about an hour of research + configuration, we pulled together a few cool drupal modules and got a digital library up and running. The digital library stores its records in custom CCK fields, were presented to users using some slickly configured Views, and used tags all over the place with a cool tag cloud from Tagadelic. With a bit of tinkering, I was able to use some Word2TXT and PDF2TXT extraction tools to generate searchable text for the document and save it to the node type using a nodeapi hook on submit/update. I also turned on the ability to leave comments and discuss documents and the RSS feed to let people know when new documents are uploaded.
The whole experience left me feeling really positive about the potential to develop some really cool digital library functionality using Drupal and maybe even move towards a “Drupal Digital Library” install profile. There are a few cool open source digital library projects (including my favorite, Greenstone), but I think Drupal has a lot to offer not only in the storing + sharing of documents. Plus, there is some great potential to develop a community of people sharing + commenting on those documents.
me too
I’m in the midst of trying to do exactly this and am wondering if there’s been any progress on the digital library recipe— even a simple list of modules and code snippets would be helpful.
thanks.
Just discovered this topic
Just discovered this topic and was wondering whether the ‘clean up’ had progressed and if you had notes to share or, even better, a Drupal install? Thanks!
Share this dude !! :-)
> With a bit of tinkering, I was able to use some Word2TXT and PDF2TXT extraction tools to generate
> searchable text for the document and save it to the node type using a nodeapi hook on submit/update
Really valuable staff.
I did my best with cck & views and I also include mail2web feature but searching inside DOC and TXT is something I didn’t know how to develop.
BTW, a couple of links that could be found interesting for you and Drupal-DMS fellowers:
http://drupalib.interoperating.info/node/41
http://dlcms.interoperating.info/
http://drupalib.interoperating.info/node/60
Cheers,
marc
Fantastic!
Like a true master at work you make it sound like a doddle! Of course I’m buttering because if you could could spare just a few mins to jot down a little guide… or at least some hints… it would be really, really appreciated! Please!
I think this is how
I think this is how documents should work in general in core. I’ve made a proposal to that effect for Google Summer of Code 2007. I’d appreciate any insights you might have into document management.
http://drupal.org/node/120677
Cheers.
There is a module for this but......
I have used a module that exist to do this:
http://interoperating.info/mark/search_attachments
It works well for me. The problem is I asked the maintainer to put the project on drupal.org, but hasn’t seem to yet. Also doesn’t seem like it’s something he wants to maintain, hence it’s only running on 4.7, which held me back from moving to 5 because I needed this functionality within the organization that uses it. It would be great if you could put this into a module and release it to the community.
A guide..
Good work, how about a step by step guide for the rest of us? =) I would really be interested in a small one. Maybe you create the profile you mentioned on the way of writing this.