Marijane,
Yes, I would encourage you to ask for help on the blacklight list,
with specifics about the problems you're having. We've set up
Blacklight on a bunch of non-Marc Solr indexes here.
- Naomi
On Jan 6, 2010, at 1:32 PM, marijane white wrote:
I've read about Blacklight's ability to run on any Solr index, but
I've
struggled to make it work with mine. Honestly, I've been left with
the
impression that my data should be in MARC if I want to use it. Is
there
some documentation on this somewhere that I've overlooked? (Maybe I
should
ask this on the BL list....)
On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Naomi Dushay <ndus...@stanford.edu>
wrote:
Marijane,
It also makes sense to examine the available software for what you
wish to
accomplish. Available software goes beyond current features to
- maintainability (one reason Stanford switched to Blacklight)
I'll talk
a little bit about this in our Code4Lib 2010 presentation about
testing.
- community
- active development
- potential applicability to additional projects. (we like
Blacklight for
its ability to run on any solr index, regardless of what's in there)
probably some other stuff I've left out.
Our experience at Stanford Libraries is that the common conventions
of
Rails give us a lot more ease in reading each others' code.
- Naomi
On Jan 5, 2010, at 3:04 PM, marijane white wrote:
Greetings Code4Lib,
Long time lurker, first time poster here.
I've been turning over this question in my mind for a few weeks
now, and
Joe
Hourcle's postscript in the Online PHP Course thread has prompted
me to
finally try to ask it. =)
I'm interested in hearing how the members of this list have gone
about
choosing development platforms for their library coding projects
and/or
existing open source projects (ie like VuFind vs Blacklight). For
example,
did you choose a language you already were familiar with? One you
wanted
to
learn more about? Does your workplace have a standard enterprise
architecture/platform that you are required to use? If you have
chosen to
implement an existing open source project, did you choose based on
the
development platform or project maturity and features or something
else?
Some background -- thanks to my undergraduate computer engineering
studies,
I have a pretty solid understanding of programming fundamentals,
but most
of
my pre-LIS work experience was in software testing and did not
require me
to
employ much of what I learned programming-wise, so I've mostly
dabbled
over
the last decade or so. I've got a bit of experience with a bunch of
languages and I'm not married to any of them. I also kind of
like having
excuses to learn new ones.
My situation is this: I would like to eventually implement a
discovery
tool
at MPOW, but I am having a hell of a time choosing one. I'm a solo
librarian on a content team at a software and information services
company,
so I'm not really tied to the platforms used by the software
engineering
teams here. I know a bit of Ruby, so I've played with Blacklight
some,
got
it to install on Windows and managed to import a really rough Solr
index.
I'm more attracted to the features in VuFind, but I don't know
much PHP
yet
and I haven't gotten it installed successfully yet. My collection's
metadata is not in an ILS (yet) and not in MARC, so I've also
considered
trying out more generic approaches like ajax-solr (though I don't
know a
lot
of javascript yet, either). I've also given a cursory look at
SOPAC and
Scriblio. My options are wide open, and I'm having a rough time
deciding
what direction to go in. I guess it's kind of similar to someone
who is
new
to programming and attempting to choose their first language to
learn.
I will attempt to head off a programming language religious war =)
by
stating that I'm not really interested in the virtues of one
platform over
another, moreso the abstract reasons one might have for selecting
one.
Have any of you ever been in a similar situation? How'd you get
yourself
unstuck? If you haven't, what do you think you might do in a
situation
like
mine?
-marijane
