C. Namba

E. Kikutani

F. Ukegawa

H. Gotoh

H. Iguchi

K. Kanaya

M. Sekimoto

M. Tanabashi

T. Kugo

T. Yoshikawa

Y. Takaiwa

National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS-Repository)

Background Status of the Project.The archival documents of NIFS-FSA are verymuch useful when studied together with other scientiﬁcarchives. Keeping in mind this, the main goal of theproject is set to establish a uniﬁed searching system forFinding Aids (documents catalog databases) of multiplearchives of scientiﬁc organizations or individual scien-tists. Another project of NIFS coorperative studies isrunning in parallel and they set similar goals with diﬀer-ent aspects and focuses on the problems due to diﬀerentchoices of system for the database servers; a commer-cially available general purpose system or a customizableopen software system. Their activities in past have beenreported in the NIFS Annual Reports of previous years,and the current report is the update for 2012 for theproject with the latter choice1).The projects uses databases of archives of KEK(High Energy Accelerator Research Organization) andIMS (Institute for Molecular Studies) as well as NIFS-FSA. For the current project other archives data whichare available from yet another project of personalarchival libraries described below are also used, whichuses the same open software for the database server.Conditions for Unified Database Servers.It is important to remind following remarks for theuniﬁed database search system;(1) the structure of catalog data follows the braodly ac-cpeted archival description standard,(2) each contributing archival library easily providessuch standard description data either by-hands oran automated system from its own database,(3) the user-interface of the system must be reason-ably easy to use for archives administrators, editors,and public users who are not necessarily experts ofinformation-science or database-technology.For (1), an international standard EAD (EncordedArchival Description) has been adopted as a generalguide line, however, the full speciﬁcation of EAD ispretty comprehensive and it contains too much details1present aﬃliation: Kyoto Sangyo Univ.more than needed for usual usage. Therefore both ofthe candidate systems use the EAD speciﬁcations onlypartially, and thus procedures of (2), exporting existingﬁnding aids into the target system, are not trivial even ifthey follow the EAD. The points of study are mainly on(2) and (3); how the data export procedures are designedfor individual archives and whether it may be applied toother cases, and the system itself and the user interfacesfor editors and users can be customized to acceptablelevel.Once the software system was chosen, which usuallyhave more capabilities than EAD requires, it is interest-ing to test whether those extra functionalities are useful.This is another points of studies in these projects, andan example will be described below.Testing Open Software System Based Server.The adopted software, archon is designed to run onLinux using Apache, MySQL, and PHP, which is recog-nized as a standard one by SAA (Society of AmericanArchivists). The test of the system has been performedfor three archives, Yukawa Memorial Hall Archival Li-brary (YHAL), Tomonaga Memorial Room ArchivalDocuments (TTMR) , and Sakata Memorial Archival Li-brary (SMAL) cooperating with the project of Grants-in-Aid for Scientiﬁc Research2). The URL of the serveris http://yhal.yukawa.kyoto-u.ac.jp/archon/.When its operation started in 2011 only SMAL datawere included, and in 2012 YHAL and TTMR data wereadded to demonstrate simultaneous search with all thesearchives. A screenof the archon sitefor the YHALis shown as anexample. Aftera little work, weimmediately re-allized that morecustomizationfor Japanese lan-guage is required.Also, a new item of study has been initiated; i.e.,adding context data or authority data of the archivalrecords into the databases of the archon. This studyneeds more work to understand its usefulness to our pur-poses.1) Y. Takaiwa et al., NIFS Annual Reports, April2011—March 2012, NIFS, (2012), pp.333; C. Nambaet al., ibid. pp.334;2) Grants-in-Aid for Scientiﬁc Research, “Study ofMemorial Archives of Yukawa, Tomonaga, anSakata and development of their archival descriptiondatabases”, granted for 2008-2010; “Development ofParticle Physics in Japan — studies through analy-ses of Memorial Archives of Yukawa, Tomonaga, anSakata”, granted for 2011-2013.494§8. Development of a Cooperative Internet Searching System of Multiple Scientific ArchivesTakaiwa, Y. (Tsukuba Univ. of Tech.),  Gotoh, H. (Kyoto Univ. Museum),  Namba, C., Iguchi, H.,  Kikutani, E., Sekimoto, M. (KEK),  Kugo, T. (Kyoto Univ., YITP1),  Tanabashi, M. (Nagoya Univ.),  Kanaya, K., Ukegawa, F. (Univ. Tsukuba),  Yoshikawa, T. (Nagoya Women’s Univ.)

Development of a Cooperative Internet Searching System of Multiple Scientific Archives

Development of a Cooperative Internet Searching System of Multiple Scientific Archives

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