The Fascinator: a lightweight, modular contribution to the Fedora-commons world

Abstract

The ARROW project sponsored a hybrid commercial/open-source approach to building vendor-supported repository infrastructure with open-source underpinnings. The Fascinator was conceived initially as a way to prove a point in an ongoing dialogue within the ARROW project about repository architecture. The goal was to test the hypothesis that it would be possible to build a useful, fast, flexible web front end for a repository using a single fast indexing system to handle browsing via facets, full-text search, multiple 'portal' views of subsets of a large corpus, and most importantly, easy-to administer security that could handle the most common uses cases seen in the ARROW community. This contrasted with the approach taken by ARROW's commercial partner, which used several different indices to achieve only some of the same functionality in an environment which was much more complex to manage and configure. The Fascinator has also been used experimentally to index research data on desktop computers, with a view to allowing academics to classify their data and have it routed to downstream repositories via protocols such as ATOM and OAI-PMH.