A fedora librarian interface

Abstract

The Fedora content management system embodies a powerful and flexible digital object model. This paper describes a new open-source software front-end that enables end-user librarians to transfer documents and metadata in a variety of formats into a Fedora repository. The main graphical facility that Fedora itself provides for this task operates on one document at a time and is not librarian-friendly. A batch driven alternative is possible, but requires documents to be converted beforehand into the XML format used by the repository, necessitating a need for programming skills. In contrast, our new scheme allows arbitrary collections of documents residing on the user's computer (or the web at large) to be ingested into a Fedora repository in one operation, without a need for programming expertise. Provision is also made for editing existing documents and metadata, and adding new ones. The documents can be in a wide variety of different formats, and the user interface is suitable for practicing librarians. The design capitalizes on our experience in building the Greenstone librarian interface and participating in dozens of workshops with librarians worldwide.