Acknowledgements & Credits
The Fascinator was built with ARROW money on Apache Solr and Fedora Commons. (Using code from the FRED project.
At USQ, there was a team involved in this work: Oliver Lucido, Ron Ward, Linda Octalina, Bronwyn Chandler Caroline Drury and Duncan Dickinson all assisted in programming and/or project management.
Alison Dellit at the National Library of Australia and Neil Dickson from Monash were on the project team as stakeholder/drivers.
Summary
Show multiple web views (portals) from a single repository in two modes: Server/Desktop.
Demonstrate the benefits of a Jython-scriptable indexer for Fedora.
Show workable access control using limit queries to constrain what user-groups can see.
Used in: Humanities repository @ USQ. Australian IR census.
What does it do?
Functionally, The Fascinator offers:
Click-to-create portals.
Easy to configure security based on a filter system, the repository owner can express security in terms of saved-searches that define what a user or group is allowed to see.
Highly flexible indexing of a Fedora repository for administrators (and by extension anything the harvesting module can scrape-up).
Runs on a server or (experimentally) the desktop.
Desktop sucker-upper
The Fascinator desktop finds all your stuff:
Treats directories/folders as metadata in their own right.
Folksy tagging and formal ontology/taxonomy support.
Route data to departmental, institutional or global repositories.
Configurable to deal with ANY data type – automatic conversion.
Configurable to deal with the way you work.
Inspirations / alternatives
Inspiration: Picasa, DigiKam and FieldHelper for data management, tagging and upload, MP3 players for browsing, Yahoo Pipes for pipiness, VuFind for faceting.
Getting involved
See the demo site or our repository census.
Download from The Fascinator website.
Download the demonstration virtual machine with The Fascinator (plus some other stuff)
Join the Google Group.