howto

Executive summary:

Here's what you'll need to run oai4courts:

• A database package that works with Rails (mySQL, Postgres, and Oracle should all work, but see here), and that you're comfortable pushing data around with it
• subversion.
• ruby, of course.
• rubygems
• You'll need some additional gems
  • appropriate gems for connecting with your database from the utility scripts you'll use to populate it
  • login_generator for authentication (don't think this packages itself with the app, but it might).
  • possibly additional gems to use with whichever relational database you're running -- see the database-specific information below
• Ruby on Rails.
• Capistrano -- a configuration and deployment manager -- is recommended but not required.
• the oai4courts package itself

The long version:

Implementation scenarios: where does the metadata come from?

OAI-PMH repository implementations consist of request- and error-handling scripts that draw on a relational database (RDBMS) for the metadata they deliver. In practice, this is because implementations that relied on real-time extraction of metadata from documents in a file tree would be unacceptably slow. So for practical purposes the question becomes one of how the metadata finds its way into the RDBMS, and that in turn depends on the nature of the documents themselves,