Saturday, December 08, 2007

UpLib personal digital library tool

From Bill Janssen of PARC, via TeleRead:

"We’re planning to release our UpLib digital library system as open source software in a couple of months, and I’m still looking for beta testers, people who’d like to receive early a raw codebase tar file which may require some hacking skills to compile and install (though, I like to think, not too much). If you know about ‘configure’ and ‘make,’ you’re a candidate. I’m particularly interested in finding beta testers who use Windows, as that platform is still somewhat of a mystery to me. We use MSYS and MINGW to create the installer for Windows. For those of you who are wondering, the core of UpLib is a document repository server which serves as a base for a number of document analysis functions."

“The system consists of a full-text indexed repository accessed through an active agent via a Web interface. It is suitable for personal collections comprising tens of thousands of documents (including papers, books, photos, receipts, email, etc.), and provides for ease of document entry and access as well as high levels of security and privacy. Unlike many other systems of the sort, user access to the document collection is assured even if the UpLib system is unavailable.”
There are a couple of PARC white paper PDFs available, from 2003 and 2005, and one ACM article from 2005 that I found.

I have no idea what the status of this is -- there appears to have been some conversation on the ebook community list that this has been vaporware for some time -- but I'm intrigued that another tool is entering the personal digital collection problem space.

1 comment:

Bill Janssen said...

It's now available for download at the UpLib web site.