May
In May there was a lot going on behind and beside the scenes. There is also an important announcement.
We are very happy that the Goobi viewer instance ORKA and the crowdsourcing module of the Goobi viewer are mentioned in the annual report 2018 of the University Library Kassel:
We would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin on being voted Library of the Year. The retro-digitisation (Goobi workflow) and the Digital State Library Berlin (Goobi viewer) were mentioned in the press release of the German Library Association and the Deutsche Telekom Foundation:
The Goobi viewer was shown and discussed during a short course at the Archiving 2019 conference in Lisbon. It is always exciting to see how many people and institutions from all over the world are positively interested in the Goobi community and its work.
The IIIF Conference will take place in Göttingen in June. There will be a workshop entitled "Creating, delivering and consuming IIIF Manifests within the Goobi Community". The Goobi viewer and the work of the Goobi community in context IIIF will be presented and practically shown. More information here:
By far the biggest change of the past month was the change of the build system from Ant to Maven. The hundreds of hours of work that have gone into it are unfortunately not visible on the surface. What that is and more details are described below.
Before we move on to the description of new developments, one more announcement: From the end of June until the beginning of August, the Goobi viewer team will only be able to work to a limited extent. Due to overlapping parental leave and vacations, the team now only consists of one colleague. For this reason we will focus on support during this time and will not develop new functionalities.
Developments
New Login
A change in the login process had been on the agenda for quite some time. Two things were in the foreground:
To simplify the login mask: Due to the increase in the number of different authentication providers, the login screen had also grown, no longer followed a clear concept and was simply unclear.
Simplify the registration process itself: No matter where you authenticate in the Goobi viewer, the user should always remain on the same page.
The result is a new login screen in which the various authentication options are available as a dropdown menu. The login is easy to use on large screens as well as on small smartphones. Even the login itself no longer leads to the user properties being displayed afterwards, or one simply no longer knows in which work under which image one wanted to write a comment. After authentication you will be redirected to the same page where the login link was clicked.
In the context of this development two more things have been changed. The link to the administration backend has been removed from the main menu and can now be found in the user menu. This makes all user-relevant functions: Manage user data, saved searches, watch lists and now optional access to the administration backend in one place.
In addition, the sidebar widget, in which a user could access his user data or log out, has been removed. This is a first step to clean up the partially overloaded sidebar.
Arabic translation
The frontend of the Goobi viewer was translated into Arabic by a project partner in Sudan. The Goobi viewer is now available in the following languages:
German
English
Spanish
French
Arabic
PDF support in CMS template for scientific editing
The CMS template for scientific editing now allows the upload and display of PDF documents. This allows scientific edits to be uploaded in PDF format and displayed true to layout in the record context.
The experience gained here can also be applied to the display of Born-Digital PDF documents.
DenkXweb support in Goobi viewer Indexer
The Goobi viewer Indexer now supports the DenkXweb format. This format, used in monument conservation and supported by the German Digital Library, can now be processed by the indexer, so that for each monument (called a monument by default) a separate data set is displayed in the Goobi viewer.
Replacing the build system Ant with Maven
Software development means that people write source code, which is then translated by a compiler into a form understood by the computer. Sourcecode then becomes bytecode during compilation.
Besides compiling, many other steps are necessary. With the Goobi viewer, for example, XHTML pages or CSS files must also be considered for display in the web browser. At the end a file should come out which contains everything and which can be installed on a server.
To control this process there are so-called build tools. These help you to structure and reliably execute the above mentioned process. The Goobi viewer has used a build system called "Ant" so far. This was replaced in May by the "Maven" build system. There are several reasons for this change. The key factor is the simplified exchange and reuse of functionalities between different software. An example is the intranda ContentServer, which is responsible for image display in Goobi workflow and the Goobi viewer. With Maven, it is much easier to update the ContentServer in the individual applications when it is updated. A further advantage is that Maven also provides recommendations for project structures, better understood perhaps as folder structures. Any software developer can move within a project without having to know the software itself, as long as they know Maven and the project follows this standard.
During the changeover, the internal project structure of the individual components also had to be adapted to each other. The following example illustrates how far-reaching the changes are:
Ant: With the Ant build system, a list of themes and installation targets was maintained at a central location in the core. When the Goobi viewer core was built, the theme was included in the core as a dependency and everything was delivered together.
Maven: With the Maven build system, the theme contains a dependency on the core. So the theme is built and the core is recorded as a dependency.
This restructuring has tied up a lot of capacity throughout the team in recent weeks and months. However, we are sure that this change will offer many advantages for the project and the software.
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