[CODE4LIB] Solr/Lucene consultant

2010-06-09 Thread Dwiggins David
We are considering the possibility of hiring a consultant to work with us on 
performance tuning and new feature development for our Solr-based collections 
search solution. I have a couple of leads on this already, but was curious if 
anyone on the list had experiences (good or bad) with anyone providing this 
type of service.  Replies on or off the list are welcome.
 
Thanks,
 
David Dwiggins
Systems Librarian/Archivist
Historic New England
ddwiggins at historicnewengland dot org
617-994-5948
http://www.historicnewengland.org

Historic New England is celebrating its centennial. Discover all that's 
happening across the region this year at 
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[CODE4LIB] PastPerfect->MARC

2011-06-10 Thread Dwiggins David
Has anyone had any experience mapping book data from PastPerfect 4 into MARC 
format for import to a library system? We have about 550 book records from an 
old version of PastPerfect that we are no longer using, and want to import them 
into our MARC-based library database. 
 
It appears that the vendor used to have an add-on called ezMARC that would do 
this, but they are no longer making it in version 5, and I'm not sure if it 
might still be available for version 4. I also don't know how effective it is 
-- would like to have a testimonial from someone before we spend money to buy 
add ons to a product we're no longer using!
 
I have all the data and could obviously map it manually. But I would obviously 
prefer to have a ready-made filter as a starting point. 
 
Ideas?
 
-David 
 
 
__
 
David Dwiggins
Systems Librarian/Archivist, Historic New England
141 Cambridge Street, Boston, MA 02114
(617) 994-5948
ddwigg...@historicnewengland.org
http://www.historicnewengland.org


[CODE4LIB] Working with Getty vocabularies

2009-02-25 Thread Dwiggins David
Is there anyone out there with experience processing the raw data files for the 
Getty vocabularies (particularly TGN)?
 
We're adopting AAT and TGN as the primary vocabularies for our new shared 
cataloging system for our museum, library and archival collections. I'm 
presently trying to come up with some scripts to automate matching of places in 
existing databases to places in the TGN taxonomy. But I'm finding that the 
Getty data files are very complex, and I haven't yet figured out a foolproof 
method to do this. I'm curious if anyone else has traveled this road before, 
and if so whether you might be able to share some tips or code snippets.
 
Since most of our place names are going to be in the US, my gut feeling has 
been to first try to extract a list of places in the US and dump things like 
state, county, etc. into discrete database fields that I can match against. But 
I find myself a bit flummoxed by the polyhierarchical nature of the data (where 
one place can belong to multiple higher level places).
 
Another issue is the wide variety of place types in use in the taxonomy. 
England, for example, is a country, but the United States is a nation. This 
makes sense to a degree, but it also makes it a bit hard to figure out which 
term to match when you're trying to automate matching against data where the 
creators were less discerning about this sort of fine distinction.
 
I feel like I'm surely not the first person to tackle this, and would love to 
exchange notes...
 
-David Dwiggins
 
 
 
 
 
 
__
 
David Dwiggins
Systems Librarian/Archivist, Historic New England
141 Cambridge Street, Boston, MA 02114
(617) 227-3956 x 242 
ddwigg...@historicnewengland.org 
http://www.historicnewengland.org ( http://www.historicnewengland.org/ )

Visit http://www.LymanEstate.org for information on renting the historic Lyman 
Estate for your next event - a very special place for very special occasions.


Re: [CODE4LIB] Working with Getty vocabularies

2009-03-02 Thread Dwiggins David
Michael - Thanks for the code snippet -- I will take a stab at putting it into 
practice when I have a few minutes. 
 
Ed -- The TGN can be searched for free on a one-off basis by going to 
 
http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/tgn/ 
 
If you want access to the raw data files (such as to load into a cataloging 
system, provide search capabilities online, or do computerized matching), this 
requires purchasing a license. But, at least in the case of our organization, 
the terms were quite reasonable, and the initial license allows us to get 
updates for five years, and then renew at a reduced rate.
 
-David Dwiggins
 
 
__
 
David Dwiggins
Systems Librarian/Archivist, Historic New England
141 Cambridge Street, Boston, MA 02114
(617) 227-3956 x 242 
ddwigg...@historicnewengland.org 
http://www.historicnewengland.org ( http://www.historicnewengland.org/ )


>>> Ed Summers  2/27/2009 11:06 AM >>>
The TGN is still behind a pay-firewall right? Not that that means it
isn't legit conversation on here (because it is) -- but just curious
what the current state is.

//Ed

Visit http://www.LymanEstate.org for information on renting the historic Lyman 
Estate for your next event - a very special place for very special occasions.


Re: [CODE4LIB] digital storage

2009-08-27 Thread Dwiggins David
I've been pondering this a lot lately. We're starting from the ground up on a 
concerted digital asset management effort after years of one-off solutions. 
When I arrived, I inherited piles of CDs and DVDs, things stashed on servers 
all over the place, etc.
 
I am now implementing a digital asset management system (ResourceSpace) to 
start ordering all this, which will bly tie into our new collections management 
system and new web content management system.
 
For the moment, I have written a script to copy the resource and preview assets 
from ResourceSpace to a bucket on S3. (To save bandwidth/time I also used the 
batch load capability to ship them a hard drive with about 500 GB of data a few 
weeks ago.) So I now have two copies of all images: one protected by RAID on 
our iSCSI storage box, and one theoretically spread across multiple data 
centers at Amazon.
 
Ideally I'd like to have one other copy at one of our remote offices (either 
online or offline), but that's for the future.
 
I'm not sure we've entirely come to terms with the long term cost of preserving 
the material. We're buying enough local storage to get through our grant-funded 
ramp-up. After that replacing/adding drives and servers is going to have to be 
considered as much of a preservation/conservation expense as replacing the a 
leaky roof. But it's a relatively new expense (or at least orders of magnitude 
bigger than it has been for other data systems) so it's something we're going 
to have to educate people on.
 
-David Dwiggins
Historic New England
 
 
__
 
David Dwiggins
Systems Librarian/Archivist, Historic New England
141 Cambridge Street, Boston, MA 02114
(617) 227-3956 x 242 
ddwiggins [at] historicnewengland.org ( mailto:ddwigg...@historicnewengland.org 
)
http://www.historicnewengland.org ( http://www.historicnewengland.org/ )


>>> Jimmy Ghaphery  8/27/2009 1:37 PM >>>
We have a historic idea of what it means to maintain space for analog 
collections. For many institutions a lot of that initial funding has 
come from capital building funds. While the technological solutions are 
not clear to me at this point (and I'm benefiting from this thread on 
that), I am not sure if this won't turn into more of a long-term 
business problem.

Has anyone been able to give a projection to their management on what 
the total cost per TB is for preservation over even a short horizon of 
10 years?

--Jimmy



-- 
Jimmy Ghaphery
Head, Library Information Systems
VCU Libraries
http://www.library.vcu.edu 
--

Visit http://www.LymanEstate.org for information on renting the historic Lyman 
Estate for your next event - a very special place for very special occasions.