Hey, I know a little about Voyager. We started working on it almost a year
ago. Ours is running Oracle on the back-end, so it can do anything Oracle
can do, which is everything. But that's for our library collection and
processes. For the rest of the collections, that is, the art, we use The
Museum System (TMS), with MS-SQL 2000 on the back-end. It can do anything
MS-SQL can do--which is almost everything, if you can find the necessary
add-on product, and stay within the licensing terms.
Unfortunately I have no current public addresses I can direct people to,
but we've had lots of success using basic, standard cgi programming
techniques to query data in either server. In other words, we step outside
the client software provided, and write our own simple web-based
queries. Once that's done, combining queries of two+ db's into one web
form, and one returned results page, is trivial.
I should be clear that we make no attempts to modify data in either of
these databases except via the standard client applications. I believe, in
the case of TMS, that would violate our licensing terms (in addition to
being risky for the data, possibly). Not so sure about Voyager, but I'm
not anxious to try it. In any case I can't think of any circumstances
where you'd want a web visitor altering data in a Voyager db.
Perl, PHP, and tcl are what we've used. In some most cases we run actually
run SQL scripts that copy, overnight, the data from the servers into a
database (PostgreSQL) on the web server, and query it from there. That
relieves some load on Voyager and TMS servers. All the Cold Fusion-type
middleware development systems have no trouble connecting to SQL servers,
not to mention VB/ASP, Lotus Domino, Java, etc (if that's where you have
expertise). As long as you're SQL, this is not really the hard part, I
don't think.
The hard part for us has been getting this stuff out to the public--we
don't have a real web strategy worked out for how to present this
data. The librarians are doing a great job with their data, which is
cleaner and more complete, and that may be out on the web soon. Of course,
looking for library books online is a proven crowd-pleasing service at this
point. The collections data isn't super-interesting for the general public
right now (not much description, mostly just names numbers, so to
speak). I don't think just making it all available for searching really
serves some compelling public interest. But on the intranet, of course,
that's fine, that's exactly what the staff want.
--Matt
At 11:13 AM 8/16/2002 -0700, you wrote:
Hi Margaret,
like everybody else, I don't know anything about Voyager, but I do have an
example of University Art Museum and Library collaboration. And of course
it is my favorite example, because it is a project the Berkeley Art Museum
is leading :-). Museums and the Online Archive of California (MOAC)
provides fairly sophisticated integration of museum and library / archival
collections through the use of various standards such as Encoded Archival
Description (EAD), Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) and
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The museum data gets integrated into a
union database consisting of about 6000 collections from about 60
repositories (libraries, archives, museums) statewide. You can check out
the project and its documentation at http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/moac/.
Cheers,
Guenter
Hello--
I was wondering if anyone working within a Museum collection has utilized
Voyager software to make their collections information accessible via the
Web.
Any comments or info greatly appreciated!
And while I am at it, does anyone have any favorite examples of University
Museum and Library collections being linked so at least a basic search is
done
across both collections?
Thanks!
Margaret Tamulonis
Project Manager
The Robert Hull Fleming Museum
University of Vermont
Burlington, Vermont
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Guenter Waibel
Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive
Digital Media Developer http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/
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Phone 510-643-8655
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