Technology

The Technology Division provides technical support to the activities and projects carried out by the Foundation. Technology activities are managed by Technology Team.

Archiving and Preserving Technology

Noolaham's primary function is to archive and preserve physical and digital sources for the long term. In addition cataloging, classification, and distribution of collected sources are of our concerns. Wherever possible physical sources are collected and digitalized. Text and images are digitalized in high quality for preservation and possible optical character recognition. Smaller size and web suitable versions (usually pdfs) are created for online distribution.

We are in the process of finalizing standards for scanning, and storing all forms of media (text, images, audio, video, web). Our standards are based on established institutional standards.

Please refer to the digital library software details for information about how meta data is collected about sources and how the sources are shared online.

Backup

There is backup and restore plan in inplace to ensure the Noolaham Foundation's long term preservation of its work from technical or other failures. The goal is to have robust mechanism to regularly backup all necessary work in multiple geographical locations and restore promptly when needed.

Noolaham Digital Library consists of three main components: the data files (pdfs, html, images), the database with metadata, and the website. All three are backed on a weekly bases on three different geographical locations.

Digital Library Software

Currently Mediawiki is being used as the digital library software for Noolaham Digital Library. Mediawiki is being currently used because it is free, easy to use and maintain. However, considering our growing needs we are in the process of transitioning into a proper institutional repository software.

Currently Noolaham technical team is evaulating various digital library software for implimentation. The following features are identified as priorities:

• Multimedia support
• Meta-data
• File system
• Search
• Browsing
• Multilinqual support
• Scalability
• Extendability
• Easy of maintenance
• Software community

Hosting

Hosting of the Noolaham digital library involves considerable IT implementation. The storage and bandwidth are two major concerns. Currently the library is hosted in a LAMP platform. The storage requirements exceed 350GB. Is being hosted by webspace2host.in as in-kind donation.