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Wednesday, February 6, 2008

MarkLogic Server Used in Princeton Theological Seminary Digital Library

Mark Logic Corporation announced that Princeton Theological Seminary has
implemented MarkLogic Server as the new basis for the library's new
digital collection. The library has launched a system for publishing
digital content to give users better access to and navigation through
more than 100,000 digital objects, including digitized representations
of historic photographs, portraits, artifacts, and journals. This
provides library members -- both seminary students pursuing advanced
degrees in divinity or theology, as well as the general public -- with
new levels of access and interactivity with historical and modern
theological works. The Seminary Library implemented MarkLogic Server to
enhance the library's existing browsing services with search and faceted
navigation including the Web 2.0 concept of user-tagging. Based on a
model of tag clouds, users apply key words to items in the digital archive,
which are then able to be used as search tools or for browsing via faceted
navigation. The digital collection is divided into visual collections
and textual collections. Mark Logic replaced the existing digital
collections infrastructure and provided a fixed, index-based navigation
of individual and multipart digital works which have been scanned from
a wealth of content related to the history of Princeton Seminary. The
index and holding metadata are stored in the metadata encoding and
transcription standard (METS), a library metadata XML standard developed
by the Library of Congress. The METS XML files describe books and journals
consisting of 100s of pages of content. Previously, access to the
collection would result in interminable wait times, often with the
browser simply timing out. Using MarkLogic, the Seminary Library can
run these queries in XQuery, returning results on these large XML files
often in less than a second and never more than three seconds.

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