university of texas repo atom use session at dlf

My somewhat unstructured notes from a presentation by Peter Keane from UT Austin on the use of Atom and Atom/Pub in their DASe repository, at at the DLF Fall 2008 Forum.

• DASe project: lightweight repository, 100+ collections, 1.2 million files, 3 million metadata records.
• DASe has replaced their image reserves system. Home grown (“built instead of borrowed”), originaly prototyped 2004/2005.
• They didn’t originally plan to build a repository, they were building an image slideshow and ended up with a repository, too.
• It’s a data first application. Data comes from spreadsheets, FM, Flickr, iPhoto, file headers, etc. System includes a variety of different collection-based data models. Needed to map to/from standard schemas. Accepted as is, no normalization or enrichment at all.
• SynOA: Syndicated Oriented Architecture. Importance recognized in being RESTful. DASe is a Rest framework.
• Use the Atom publishing protocol to represent collections and items and searches. Used internally between services, including upload and ingest (uses http get, post, etc). Everything is Atom with a UI (Smarty PHP templates) on top of it.
• Working on a Blackboard integration.
• Interesting use of Google spreadsheets – create Google spreadsheet for whatever they have a name/value pairs, automatically outputs atom, can ingest from feed.
• No fielded search across collections, only within a single collection. They could map across data models to a common standard, but haven’t. (corrected as per comment below)
  
• Repositories were considered a door to libraries, all trying to create a better door. This is not the right concept, instead should be exposing in a standard way to any and all services.
• Loves REST; used the term “RESTafarian.”