CDR Summer 2011 enhancements
The CDR development team has been busy this spring and summer building enhancements to both back-end and public-facing components of the repository. The result is a much stronger CDR this fall. Here’s a list of the major new features we’ve released since June.
User Interface
- The repository’s user interface has been completely redesigned to be more visually appealing and to make it easier for users to preview and download the content they find
- Integrated dynamic content on the CDR home page, such as featured collections, news items from the blog, and a feed of the most recently added materials
- Enabled the display of thumbnail images throughout the site and introduced jpeg 2K previews on full record pages
- Implemented inline viewer for jpeg 2K images using the Djatoka image server
- Implemented inline.mp3 and .mp4 playback using incremental download
- All available descriptive information now displayed on an object’s full record page
Access enhancements
- Enabled search engine crawling–CDR materials available through web search engines
- Improved local indexing returns more relevant search results
- Created advanced search interface
- Enabled faceted browsing of repository materials. Users can browse by the repository or collections structure, or limit results by collection, academic department, format, language, or subject
Access control
- Group-based access control applied at the object level
- Integrated with public user interface to display only content that is available to a given user
- Support for embargoes at the object level
- Uses Fedora’s internal access controls
- Integrates with campus Shibboleth and Grouper services
Workbench
- Supports for access control in metadata, including embargo
- Improved schema-based METS and MODS support
- Includes support for multiple networked staging areas, including iRODS and the Library’s digital archive, reducing the amount of time spent moving large files over the network for ingest staging
Mid-tier services
- Derivative image generation and processing on ingest
- Technical metadata extraction using FITS
- Indexing of new or modified metadata is faster
- Mid-tier processing “catch-up” services are now on a scheduler that runs nightly instead of having to be manually invoked
Solr index redesign
- Index schema completely re-designed to drive enhanced access through the new UI
- Solr ingest is multi-threaded and several orders of magnitude faster than previous implementation.
- Virtually all reindexes happen without system downtime
- More data is indexed, improving retrieval
- Search algorithm is improved, resulting in fewer false hits in search results
Code clean-up
- Consolidated multiple build files into one master build file. Reorganized code to streamline code integration process.
- Audited code for sensitive information and placed configuration files in private repository to prepare for release of CDR on github.
- Implemented Jenkins for nightly integration of code updates into the repository. This reduces the problems that can occur when multiple developers are working on divergent local code bases.
- CDR code released on GitHub in September 2011.
