Master Degree in Library and Information Management- 2017

Lebanese University Beirut, Lebanon

Thesis title: The Lebanese LAM Sector: Collaboration Amongst National Heritage Institutions: Reality and Implementation

B.A. in Information and Library Management- 2006

Lebanese University, Faculty of Information and Documentation   Beirut, Lebanon

The purpose of this project is to design a simple website portal that integrates results from several sources from 3 main groups; library, archive and museum.

Ideally, cataloged records of each group should be based on a certain standards for instance MARC21 for libraries, EAD and DCMI for archives and museums. For the purpose of this portal, standards facilitate the work and make it easier for future enhancements and maintenance. When the implementation is done based on certain standards, we would be able to add as much records as we need and from any source as long as these data comply with the standards.

 In real world however, it was hard to find that the needed data complies with the known standards. Records were collected from the Lebanese National Library, American University of Beirut, UMAM, Phoenix Center for Lebanese Studies, Arab Image Foundation, Sursock Museum and the Lebanese Heritage Museum. Records collected from the Lebanese National Library and AUB library and archive were based on MARC standard, however all other collected records were not complying to any standard.

The format of the records needed for this portal is JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). Some records were given by mrk, others by xml, Excel or by word tables. This made our task more complicated. We used MarcEdit for converting mrk files to marcxml files. As for excel and word tables, we had to manually write them in an xml format. After that using an online convertor we transformed our xml files into JSON.

Now that we have our JSON files ready, we have used an open source federated search for indexing our files and searching through them. The open source federated search engine used here is Elastic Search which can be checked in details here https://www.elastic.co/products/elasticsearch.  

For our webpage we have used PHP as a server side language and installed the necessary elastic search libraries for Php as instructed here https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/client/php-api/current/_installation_2.html.  First we need to download and install the necessary software (Kibana server, Elastic search, Curl) and libraries;

Indexing process for our Json files was done as documented here: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/client/php-api/current/_indexing_documents.html.

After indexing our records we implemented the search function which retrieves the relevant records for the given query as documented here:  https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/client/php-api/current/_search_operations.html.