SimpleDL is a digital collection of management software that allows for the upload, description, management and access of digital collections. It is UTF-8 compatible and is not limited by format, capable of handling documents, PDFs, images, videos, audio files, and data-only objects. Furthermore, it can connect content so that multi-page documents, scores, or books can be uploaded and organized into chapters, books, or by page number. It can also combine any number of images into one single display object. The software is mostly used by libraries, archives, museums, government agencies, universities, corporations, historical societies, and other organizations that wish to host a digital collection. On March 24, 2016, SimpleDL announced that it was being purchased by Sobek Digital Hosting and Consulting LLC, which offers digital consulting and hosting services and supports the open-source SobekCM digital hosting software.{{Cite web, url=http://simpledl.blogspot.com/2016/03/simpledl-acquired-by-sobek-digital.html, title=SimpleDL acquired by Sobek Digital Hosting and Consulting, last=, first=, date=March 24, 2016, website=, archive-url=, archive-date=, access-date=April 9, 2019

Design

SimpleDL is standards-based and supports numerous industry standards including

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

, Qualified Dublin Core, XML, and OAI-PMH. The

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

is based on Dublin Core, a flexible extensible metadata standard created by OCLC in 1995. Dublin Core has been accepted as a NISO standard.

The Process: How It Works

Digital items can be added to a SimpleDL digital collection through standard web browsers and standard web interfaces. Items can be added one at a time or in batches. The digital collections reside on a server, either locally or at the firm. Additional functions are available such as creating and editing metadata templates, administering the use of controlled vocabularies, importing metadata (tab-delimited text), exporting

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

, generating OCR during the import-export using the OCR Extension, and viewing statistical reports.

Framework

Searching abilities are provided by a custom Solr build, permanent storage is provided by the

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

database engine, and pages are served through the

Apache HTTP Server The Apache HTTP Server ( ) is a free and open-source software, free and open-source cross-platform web server, released under the terms of Apache License, Apache License 2.0. It is developed and maintained by a community of developers under the ...

and PHP. The software has an option to store and deliver the digital documents with Amazon S3 to provide high durability of files. Collections hosted by SimpleDL utilize Amazon EC2 servers.

References

External links

SimpleDL's Website
Digital library software Institutional repository software Collection managers