Building a Catalog!

I got approval to build the catalog for a small non-profit! Yay! The web developer for the non-profit gave me a subdomain to do all my fun, which means that I can install plugins to my heart's content and explore what is best.

I'm building out a few other pages, such as bibliographies and galleries of their content. Which meant that I needed access to the backend of their main domain to discover their content because the website is an organizational mess.

I'm using WordPress and the Web Librarian plugin for catalog creation. I'm using WorldCat for the bibliographical information of text items. After I've imported a lot of records, I need to see what the search capabilities are and whether there is an ability to create a thesaurus. At the moment, I'm not sure there is- certainly a list of keywords/subject in alphabetical order, but a thesaurus with relationships, which is key to discovery, that's what I think is missing within the features and so the question will be whether I can create something.

Maybe create a form using custom post types of:

Keyword
definition
RT
NT
BT

and then somehow tie them to the catalog entry form...

But YAY! having fun, fun, fun!

Creating a Catalog using WordPress

I want to create a catalog.

I want to learn what it takes to be able to search a collection based on things like creator name and format or the language of the resource.

I want to create a thesaurus of terms with lists of preferred terms and broader terms and I want to see how to bend technology that is accessible to all to create this hierarchical list so that a person can browse through the thesaurus.

In short, I'd like to see if WordPress can actually make a catalog. There are some hints along the way such as the plugins WebLibrarian and Custom Post Type UI. But I'm wondering if I can use the plugin to add the content (in my case, a list of resources with their associated metadata that is searchable) and I'm wondering if I can create the thesaurus, let people search/browse through the thesaurus to find the term they are looking for, or to discover all the terms that could mean more or less the same thing and then find everything in the collection based on that term. How do the two interact with each other technology wise... in WordPress?

I submitted a proposal... just waiting to hear back if the non-profit I want to do this for will allow me to mad genius up their website.

wish me luck.

I Just Created a Local Installation of WordPress!

I have given myself a summer project to create a video catalog using WordPress and either the Dublin Core metadata scheme or a subset of the scheme created by Rutgers University for their OpenMIC cataloging software. I'm working with Kinetic Illusions to catalog both their raw video files and their completed project files to describe the raw files based on subject matter, geographic location, time of year, etc and describe which raw files were used in which completed projects.

So one step of the project is to figure out how Kinetic will use the database and what metadata elements are of upmost importance.

As Kinetic is planning to create a WordPress version of their website, and is the software of choice for their web services, and as I saw that Library Technology Reports published the Using WordPress as a Library Content Management System report, I thought creating the catalog using WP would be a good project. Only problem is... I don't do WordPress.

So I'm reading Lisa Sabin-Wilson's WordPress All-in-One for Dummies and the steps are very clear, however she doesn't cover creating a local installation, meaning on my computer, rather than on the web, which is her assumption. So I had to go find software which would recreate the online environment that WordPress requires. Namely I needed a database and a server. As I use a Mac, I discovered MAMP: Mac Apache mySQL PHP. (I don't remember exactly how, I must have googled "wordpress local installation Mac.")

Now, I'm seriously superstitious about getting things to work, so I desperately searched for some step by step instructions for installing said MAMP 1.9.6 and WP 3.2.1. The following youtube video was created using slightly older versions of the software, but it was mostly the same.

I followed these instructions step by step and successfully installed WordPress! Needless to say, much celebration insued as I am not tech architecture savvy, but that's why they created the helpful software. Thanks, local community for sharing your resources and your knowledge!

Now back to the for Dummies book.