drupalib A place for library drupallers to hang out

I haven't posted to drupalib for a while so I thought I'd describe one of the Drupal projects I'm working on (the other is an update to my search_attachments module.)

For the last month or so I've been developing a Drupal 6.x module that allows searching of collections hosted in a CONTENTdm server from within a Drupal website. This development is being done as part of the MulticulturalCanada digitization initiative that Simon Fraser University Library, where I work, is the lead partner on. We are using Drupal for the public website, but are using CONTENTdm as the collection management application for close to half a million pages of newspapers, several thousand still images, several thousand books, and a few hundred audio interviews that make up the MulticulturalCanada umbrella collection. SFU is partnering with five other institutions on the selection and digitization of the content, and with several educators who are developing learning materials to accompany the specific collections.

In addition to providing access to this material managed by SFU's CONTENTdm instance, the Drupal site will contain, as regular nodes, a digitized (DocBook XML) encyclopedia, the aforementioned set of teaching and learning aids, and a number of other resources.

We decided to develop this module because we wanted to present a single integrated website to our end users. We have deviated from that principle slightly in that within the full record for each item, we plan to provide a link to that item in CONTENTdm's native interface, where the user can enjoy the sophisticated image zoom, comparison, cropping, and rotating tools that CONTENTdm provides. People might also want to use the CONTENTdm version if they need advanced searching, which we're not providing in the Drupal interface. By providing unified access to all our content in one site, and also providing direct item-level links from that site to the same items in the richer CONTENTdm interface, we're hoping to satisfy as many users as possible.

Update 2008-04-11: I have been informed by OCLC that this module can be distributed under the GPL, as can any application that uses the CONTENTdm API. It is only the API document that cannot be shared. Cool!

The module is still under development, but here are some screensnaps showing progress so far. You will recognize the Garland theme in my development version, but we're getting a web designer to do a proper theme for the public site.

The basic search form, where you can select collections the administrator has approved for public access:

Plain vanilla (so far) results list. I plan to add proper Drupal theming functions to the module so the layout and style of the results and item entries can be modified easily to fit the site's theme:

If the item is a compound item (i.e., it has mutiple parts), you get to see the first 20 parts or all of them if it has fewer than 20. So far our compound objects are either books or newspaper issues so this display is page-oriented.

The top of the display showing a single page from the previous compound object. The intra-document page browser isn't working yet.

A screen cap of the admin page, with several of the field sets expanded:

An example of a non-textual item, from the Vancouver Public Library's collection:

This module nicely demonstrates both Drupal's and CONTENTdm's flexibility. It is a simple client that interacts with the CONTENTdm server - basically, it passes searches performed by the user of the Drupal site to CONTENTdm, which returns records for display in a results list. Choosing a record retrieves that item's metadata and content files, which are then displayed in the Drupal site. Items retrieved and displayed using this module have no identity within Drupal (that is, they are not nodes in Drupalspeak), so users cannot leave comments, apply taxonomy terms to them, etc. We're working against a tight deadline in this project, but after the heat is off I intend to add programmatic creation of stub nodes that will allow the attaching of comments and taxonomy terms within the Drupal site to items that "live" in CONTENTdm.

Our funders, Canadian Culture Online, expect a beta version of the site by the end of April and we should be going live shortly after that.