Library Computing Talk. The CERN Document Server Link Manager
by
David McGlashan, Jean-Yves Le Meur (CERN / AS)
→
Europe/Zurich
IT Auditorium (CERN)
IT Auditorium
CERN
Description
Storing Web addresses in a database is very awkward because document
URLs may change and become out of date. To avoid this trap within the
CERN library databases, we have developed a Link Manager called 'Setlink'.
All electronic documents kept in the library system (more than 400K) are uniquely identified by a long-term URL, pointing to a program which finds out the real location of files. When the storage system changes or files are renamed, the Link Manager is simply updated and all the URLs remain valid.
This talk will stress the importance of using a Link Manager for any
long-term Web server. It will explain how the Setlink Link Manager is
designed to handle a wide range of document types and formats, from
photos in JPEG to eprints in PDF. We will describe the method used on the library database side and we will outline the flexible 'Setlink' architecture.
Some examples will be demonstrated. Finally, we will focus on other
possibilities offered by using such an application, like automatic figures extraction or concatenation, fulltext searching and on-the-fly format conversions.
The talk may be especially interesting to people setting up electronic
catalogues or writing a Web interface to a database system.
Organiser(s): M.Marquina and R.Ramos /IT-User Support
