This is the photocat cataloging application developed by the Indiana University Digital Library Program to catalog photographs and other materials in their Fedora repository.
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Cataloger-Centered Design The whole purpose of the application is to make the often tedious work of cataloging easier so that catalogers can apply their expertise quickly without wasting time with tedious interfaces.
To this end, Photocat supports auto-complete text entry that can be linked to internal and external sources. Vocabularies can be managed locally or externally.
It supports sophisticated reporting and search and replace functionality.
Support for spreadsheet-based export and import enable yet another convenient way to manage metadata.
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Configurable Metadata Photocat was written with the knowledge that metadata standards and best practices change constantly.
Towards that end, every collection has its own metadata configuration that defines what fields are available, how they're labeled, what usage notes should be made available to catalogers, how the field should show up in search results, etc. Furthermore individual fields may be designated as private and are protected from access by unauthorized individuals.
Which metadata fields are exposed in the cataloging interface for a given collection is something that can be configured and changed at any time.
Collection configuration includes the ability to export metadata to alternate formats.
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Modular architecture The Photocat application is only a piece of a larger repository environment. While this codebase includes an indexing service, search service and recommended repository service, those pieces may be substituted by conforming to a clear and documented API.
With relative ease, one could use an alternate search server, different storage repository or derivative generation mechanism.
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Preservation-focused Photocat was written knowing that descriptive metadata is a valuable resource, whose preservation is of the utmost importance.
- Full history and audit trail of changes is preserved
- Repository-centric design (all metadata is stored in the repository)
- documented formats for transparency
The application requires several supporting applications in order to function.
Fedora must be installed and must have the resource index enabled with synchronous updates. JMS messaging must also be turned on. Furthermore, XACML policy enforcement is used by Photocat, so Fedora need not be exclusively used for photocat, and may be the host repository for other applications.
This simple application listens to JMS messages emitted by fedora to maintain a search index used by SRW.
This extension of the OCLC SRW server implementation exposes a sophisticated search API used by Photocat.
This is the cataloging application, and public facing discovery application. One can configure Photocat to only expose the cataloging interface, the public discovery interface or have a single application provide both. This allows for a variety of deployment configurations to suit various needs. The application is built with concurrency in mind and multiple instances running at once all pointing at the same repository is a fully supported use case.
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