Re: [greenstone-users] Multiple users updating a collection From: Michael Dewsnip Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2007 17:40:28 +1200

Re: [greenstone-users] Multiple users updating a collection

From	Michael Dewsnip
Date	Tue, 03 Jul 2007 17:40:28 +1200
Subject	Re: [greenstone-users] Multiple users updating a collection
In-Reply-To	(200706142301-08272-d-sieborger-ru-ac-za)
Hi David, > I'm a system administrator, so while I'm not too familiar with the > librarian concepts in Greenstone, I've become involved in a > recently-started Greenstone project. I'd appreciate any advice from > those more experienced in Greenstone on a question that's been > troubling me. > > A number of users are gathering and cataloguing content in the project. > Up until now, they've each had a complete installation of Greenstone > 2.72 on their Windows PCs, and been using local GLI to work on their > separate collections. Now the team would like to make the entire > collection available on the web, so I've setup a dedicated web server > for them. They all still need to continue adding content, though, and > I'm not sure what the best way to support that is. > > The cataloguers' idea is to continue working on their own collections, > and copy the collections to the web server once a week. However, that > becomes complicated because the GDBM files from their Windows PCs have > to be converted with db2txt/txt2db before they work on the FreeBSD web > server. > > My first idea was to have a single collection on the web server, which > they could use Remote GLI to update -- but it seems only one person may > have the collection open at a time. (As a matter of interest, would > Greenstone 3 be better in that respect? I'm told that there's a > particular feature that they need that's not yet available in > Greenstone 3 so we couldn't convert at the moment.) > Greenstone 3 will not be better in this regard -- the "one user only" limitation is a limitation of the remote GLI functionality. This may be improved in the future (but it makes everything a lot more complex, so I wouldn't hold your breath), in which case both Greenstone 2 and Greenstone 3 will benefit. A note of caution: the remote GLI functionality is still fairly new, so expect a few problems. > My current idea is to move their individual collections to the web > server (going through the GDBM conversion once) and then the > cataloguers can all use Remote GLI to work on their own collections > simultaneously. We should then be able to use an overall collection > with the "supercollection" option to allow web users to search across > all the collections. > This sounds OK, although the "supercollection" functionality has some limitations with browsing (it only works for searching). A potentially better solution is to combine the "archives" directories of all the collections into one collection on the server, then build this (say, every night). This means both searching and browsing will work. Regards, Michael -- DL Consulting Greenstone Digital Library and Digitisation Specialists contact@dlconsulting.com www.dlconsulting.com