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DocuBase
Home Page
Search the Collection
Start a New Collection
Add/Delete/Edit Documents
Frequently Asked Questions
Supported Document Types
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DocuBase is a set of services that allows users to
store, organize and maintain network-accessible distributed document
resources. Examples of such resources are on-line readers for courses,
collections of documents related to some topic, collections of personal
documents, technical report series, and collections of documents
mantained by a working group.
The primary services provided by DocuBase are collection management
service and repository service. In our terminology, a
collection is a set of documents, which in turn may comprise one or more
(potentially distributed) resources (general, a fixation of that
document in a given format). The collection manager lets users create,
populate, maintain and search collections, among other things. Of
course, the resources comprising documents in a collection have to live
somewhere. If a resource already has a satisfactory network-accessible
home, a collection may just point to that. However, if it doesn't, as
may be the case for a paper document in a filing cabinet or an
electronic document on a local disk, the repository server affiliated
with our collection manager will provide storage for it.
Why Use DocuBase?
Since a collection is just a set of pointers to resources, one may think
of a collection as just a glorified set of bookmarks. Indeed, a
collection is really just the metadata for a set of documents (i.e., the
author, title and so forth) plus some pointers. While entering metadata
is optional, right now it must to be entered by hand, so it is a bit
more work to use the collection manager than just to make a bookmark.
So, why bother?
- Organization: The collection manager allows multiple formats of the
same work to be organized together. E.g., a user who initially has only
a scanned image format of a document may easily later supplement it with
an HTML version, when such become available.
- Availability: The collection manager caches resources in each
collection. If the original resource is poorly connected to the
network, or subsequently becomes unavailable, the collection manager
will still make it available.
- Searching: Items in each collection are indexed, both by metadata
and full-text. So users can easily search just those documents in a
given collection.
- Integrating paper and electronic content: The collection manager, in
conjunction with the repository manager, allows users to easily include
scanned image documents and born-digital documents in the same
collection. Rather than the common-denominator format for such
collections being paper, it can now be digital.
- Integrating personal and remote content: Many users have documents
which they have placed haphazardly in various locations. Finding these
may become difficult over time. DocuBase gives users a sensible place to
file such documents for future reference.
- Collaboration: Accessible to collections can be restricted to a
group, facilitating collaborate among individuals across different
administrative domains.
How To Use DocuBase
The basic services of the collection manager are available from the home
page. There users will find forms for (i) searching existing
collections, (ii) creating a new collection, (iii) modifying an existing
collection, and (iv) adding scanned image document to a collection. The
first two services should be relatively self-explanatory, involving
filling out and submitting a single web form. Modifying collections is
a bit more involved, only because there are more options: Editing
document or collection metadata, adding a new document (with and without
requesting that it be housed in the affiliated repository), adding a new
format to an existing document, deleting an existing documents, moving
and copying documents from collection to collection. However, using
each of these services is just a matter of filling out web forms.
Abiding by Intellectual Property Restrictions
Some of the documents a user places in a collection may be encumbered.
It is up to the user to be sure that IP rights are not being violated.
One feature users might use to help do so is provide an access password
for a collection. Then only those individuals possessing that password
will have access to the documents via DocuBase. It is up to each collection
editor to determine whether this or some other arrangement is
satisfactory for any particular document.
Supported Formats
A fair number of document types are currently supported, based primarily
on our ability to extract text from the type. Scanned documents are stored
in Acrobat via Capture. See a complete list of supported document types
here.
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