Manakin coming-out at OR 2007

The hosts of the Open Repositories 2007 conference are the University of Texas and Texas A&M, and they are taking full advantage of the conference to promote the projects of the Texas Digital Library. One TDL project, in particular, will clearly have a major impact on the repository scene.

While DSpace has been a successful project by any measure, many have lamented that the standard user interface is difficult to customize. The Digital Initiatives office at Texas A&M took this challenge head-on by developing a fully-customizable, XML-based user interface for DSpace. Dubbed Manakin, it is one of the major stories of this conference.

The two important concepts to understand with Manakin are aspects and themes. Aspects are functional bits of code that work directly with the DSpace API. Themes are the combinations of documents (such as a CSS) that format the data coming out of DSpace in order to customize its look for the web. Manakin takes data from DSpace and formats it into a basic document called a DRI-document. The Manakin aspects and themes add code to the DRI-doc to produce the formatted XHTML that displays in a web browser.

Manakin allows for three levels of customization, allowing for different levels of knowledge, resources, and need in the institution:

1. Style: CSS/XHTML
2. Theme: XSL/CSS/XHTML
3. Aspect: Java/Cocoon development

Adam Mikeal, Lead Software Developer at Texas A&M, demonstrated the great potential for Manakin. A&M digitized the Geologic Atlas of the United States, a series of map folios produced between 1894 and 1945. They loaded it into DSpace, but it was clear that DSpace did not reveal the full value of the collection. It did not allow retrieval based on the geographical nature of the collection, nor did it provide an ideal display of the items in the collection. To address some of these problems, they used Manakin to develop a custom user interface for the collection that shows the geographical coverage of these folios through the use of a web 2.0 style mash-up. In other words, this new interface integrates a custom designed web site, data from a DSpace collection, and the Yahoo!Map API to create an innovative way to display a unique and valuable collection digitized by the library. In all, this project provides an excellent example of how libraries can use emerging technologies to provide improved information services to our patrons.