Updates and New Projects

Thought it best to just have a quick update as there's so much going on at the moment I'm in danger of missing important announcements.

Just before I left for a weeks holiday Neil, Hana and I attended a kick-off meeting for the JISC Transcoder project. There's information about the project at that link, although I'll be posting more about this shortly. We've already had loads of interest both from content providers and interested HE partners who want to be involved in testing and development. To cause such a stir so early on is great IMNSHO. I'm going to try and get a project page together in the coming week, and unless anyone has any better ideas I'm planning to tag project announcements and direct links as jisc-transcoder. A project-transcoder tag is available for resources useful to the project. so we can get some feeds going.

Hana has already made huge progress on the first release (Which transcodes a package into itself, but lets us test the upload/download and cloud infrastructure) and we expect to be sitting down real soon now to put some priorities on the next release.

Here's an aggregated pipe of transcoder tags and blog entries.

Wanted : HTML digitisation Silos needing an OAI feed

We've just been talking to a really cool sheffield geek who's got a neat HTML screen-scraping service and integrated it into JZKit to provide dynamic meta-search across services with no machine to machine interface. Very Cool.

However, in our discussions we realised that it might have even more value as a tool for converting HTML Silos into metadata-rich repositories. By combining this service with a SWORD deposit client and some MD5 checksums we can help digitisation projects who have large well-organised web sites, but perhaps don't have OAI or SRU/SRW, we can create a preservation hub that exposes the content using open standards.

If you have a HTML silo of digitized data (Or any data for that matter) but no OAI or SRU, and you need such services, we'd love to test this idea by writing the scripts to populate an OAI and SRU repository... Any volunteers?

Going to spend some spare time throwing this and the JDBC/OAI/SRU gateway together hopefully in time for library mashup and bathcamp. Maybe we can come out of those events with some newly exposed data sources contributing to the linked data network.

Fun :)

New version of JZkit Proxy Server

An updated version of the JZKit Proxy server (With an example configuration exposing a number of SOLR backends as a z3950 target) is available for download Here

Since the initial test at the Bath CRIG barcamp we've improved the error handling and diagnostics, improved the mapping of Z3950 database names, made the attribute mapping more configurable (The out out the box sample config is pretty much Bath profile level 1 OK), improved the structure==year mappings for date search and done some pretty hefty load testing which revealed a thread leak in certain situations (It's fixed now).

Please download, play and get in touch with any questions / comments.

Ian.