SimpleDL is digital collection management software that allows for the upload, description, management and access of digital collections and is UTF-8 compatible. SimpleDL is not limited by format and is capable of handling documents, PDFs, images, videos, audio files, and data only objects. In addition to simple digital files, SimpleDL can also connect content so multipage documents, scores, or books can be uploaded and organized into chapters, books or by page number. SimpleDL can also combine any number of images into one display object. SimpleDL is mostly used by libraries, archives, museums, government agencies, universities, corporations, historical societies, and other organizations that wish to host a digital collection.

Design

SimpleDL is standards-based and supports numerous industry standards including Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

, Qualified Dublin Core, XML, and OAI-PMH. The metadata

Metadata

The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

 is based on Dublin Core

Dublin Core

The Dublin Core metadata terms are a set of vocabulary terms which can be used to describe resources for the purposes of discovery. The terms can be used to describe a full range of web resources: video, images, web pages etc and physical resources such as books and objects like artworks...

, a flexible extensible metadata standard created by OCLC

OCLC

OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. is "a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs"...

 in 1995. Dublin Core has been accepted as an NISO

Niso

Niso is a genus of very small parasitic sea snails, marine gastropod mollusks or micromollusks in the family Eulimidae. -Species:According to the World Register of Marine Species the following species with accepted names are included within the genus Niso * Niso aeglees Bush, 1885* Niso albida...

 standard (NISO Standard Z39.85-2001).

The Process: How It Works

Digital items can be added to a SimpleDL digital collection through standard web browsers and standard web interfaces. Items can be added one at a time or in batches. The digital collections reside on a SimpleDL Server, either installed locally or on an SimpleDL-hosted server.

Additional collection management functions are available such as creating and editing metadata templates, administering the use of controlled vocabularies, importing metadata (tab-delimited text), exporting metadata

Metadata

The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

 in XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

, generating OCR

OCR

OCR may refer to:* Optical character recognition, conversion of images of text into characters** The OCR-A font, designed to simplify character recognition** The similar OCR-B font* Transvaginal oocyte retrieval, a technique used in in vitro fertilization...

 during the import export using the OCR Extension, and viewing statistical reports.

Framework

Searching abilities are provided by a custom Solr

Solr

Solr is an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document handling...

 build, permanent storage is provided by MySQL

MySQL

MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...

 database engine, and pages are served through Apache

Apache

Apache is the collective term for several culturally related groups of Native Americans in the United States originally from the Southwest United States. These indigenous peoples of North America speak a Southern Athabaskan language, which is related linguistically to the languages of Athabaskan...

 and PHP

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

. SimpleDL also has an option to store and deliver the digital documents with Amazon S3

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is an online storage web service offered by Amazon Web Services. Amazon S3 provides storage through web services interfaces...

 to provide high durability of files. SimpleDL hosted collections are hosted using Amazon EC2 servers.

See also

• Book scanning
  Book scanning
  Book scanning is the process of converting physical books and magazines into digital media such as images, electronic text, or electronic books by using an image scanner....
  
  
• Digital library
  Digital library
  A digital library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats and accessible by computers. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks...
  
  
• Digital Library Application Software
• Digitization
• Institutional repository
  Institutional repository
  An Institutional repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating - in digital form - the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution....
  
  
• Optical character recognition
  Optical character recognition
  Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...
  
  

External links

• SimpleDL's Website
• SimpleDL @ Jackson County Library
• SimpleDL @ Bridgewater State University