[Dspace-general] Digital Assets Factory (DAF) Announcement

[Mark Diggory]

Very interesting,

Congratulations on your release.

I would like to introduce myself, I am Mark Diggory, DSpace Systems  
Manager at MIT and a commiter member of the DSpace Developer Community.

Firstly, your system is an interesting platform that appears to be  
architecturally a number of Swing clients working over the network  
with a central MySQL database. Is this assumption correct?

Secondly, what is your organizations position  concerning  
interoperability and integration with other IR platforms and with the  
diverse and custom software ecosystem that libraries and other  
organizations employ to meet their needs? Its one thing to promote a  
product as an all-in-one solution, as a Systems Manager, I'm more  
interested in how your product fits into the existing ecology of Open  
Source and commercial tooling that organizations already have a  
significant investment in.

Concerns that your product raises.

1.) Some might feel GPL licensing is a barrier (no matter how real or  
imaginary) to uptake and reuse of a tool in the software ecosystem of  
the organization. I've looked at your source distribution and  
discovered its license is actually LGPL, is this accurate?

2.) Any "workflow" system today will need to have a strong focus on  
interoperability/integration with other Open Source and Commercial  
Platforms. What avenues for such interoperability/integration are  
available in your product?

These questions/concerns are not meant to criticize your efforts, but  
help us as the community better understand your platforms  
capabilities and your organizations stance in participating within  
the larger educational/institutional software ecosystem.

Cheers,
Mark Diggory

On Sep 23, 2007, at 9:19 AM, Dar wrote:

> Bibliotheca Alexandrina has the pleasure to announce the release of  
> the Digital Assets Factory (DAF) version 2.0. DAF is available for  
> download at http://wiki.bibalex.org/DAFWiki and is offered under  
> the GPL license as an open source application so that the user can  
> freely utilize it or even make necessary modifications to match  
> specific needs.
>
> DAF v2.0 can be considered as an all-in-one solution for any  
> digitization system. It provides all the necessary tools required  
> to manage the whole process of a digitization workflow, including  
> its various phases, user management, file movement and archiving.  
> It provides the flexibility to manage multiple simultaneous  
> projects with a diversity of materials such as books, journals,  
> newspapers, manuscripts, unbound materials, audio, video, and slides.
>
> DAF v2.0 allows easy integration of any tool used to perform  
> functions of the workflow, such as the OCR, image processing, etc.  
> It can be integrated with the current tools used at an organization.
>
> DAF v2.0 is highly reliable and can be configured for large and  
> challenging digitization projects. The system is fully deployed in  
> BA digitization laboratory and has been working smoothly for over a  
> year.
>
> Key features:
>
>
>
> ·        The system is capable of defining different workflows for  
> various types of objects: Images, books, slides, etc. Each workflow  
> contains different phases (Scanning, OCR, PDF encoding, Backup, etc).
>
> ·        DAF v2.0 is an all-in-one system that provides all the  
> necessary tools required for administration, digitization  
> operation, reporting and archiving.
>
> ·        DAF v2.0 has flexible integration with any source of  
> metadata such as ILS or a library digital document repository. This  
> integration is possible through Check-in and Check-out plug-in  
> modules that can be added at any time.
>
> ·        DAF v2.0 has the ability to define pre-phase and post- 
> phase checks and actions by simply editing an XML definition for a  
> phase.
>
> ·        DAF v2.0 can be tailored to any environment. A developer  
> can add code snippets to be executed pre-phase or post-phase to  
> accomplish specific tasks.
>
> ·        DAF v2.0 supports both manual and automated operations.  
> Different workflow operations can be invoked from the command line  
> to enable batch processing.
>
> ·        The flexible workflow supports ingesting a job in the  
> middle of the workflow. The administrator can also change the job's  
> normal flow.
>
> ·        DAF v2.0 tracks the history of the job's life cycle. It  
> records time stamped actions applied to the job, including the user  
> who performed the action and the workstation on which the action  
> was performed.
>
> ·        User’s access level defines which functions are available  
> for each user, up to the level of disabling a button
>
> ·        DAF v2.0 is easy to install and configure.
>
>
>
> For more information, please visit http://wiki.bibalex.org/DAFWiki  
> or send an email to daf at bibalex.org
>
>
>
>
>
> The Digital Assets Repository (DAR) team.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Dspace-general at mit.edu
> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/dspace-general



~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mark R. Diggory - DSpace Systems Manager
MIT Libraries, Systems and Technology Services
Massachusetts Institute of Technology


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