Data Delivery Layer

The targeted user population for the Documentary Sources database is the international community of arts and humanities scholars. The eventual primary delivery mechanism for the Documentary Sources database will be the World Wide Web. A major initiative for the Project is the development of a powerful search interface that can serve as the window into the database for the user community. In creating this end-user interface, the primary goal is to provide the tools for performing complex searches with relative ease.

At present, The Medici Archive Project has several pilot access sites running the standalone database with an interim user interface. It is currently installed at the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Research Library of the Courtauld in London. In October 1999, the Documentary Sources database will also be installed in the Library of Villa I Tatti in Florence, in the Reading Room of the Florentine State Archive, and in the Library of the Sovrintendenza per i Beni Archivistici per la Toscana. (See: Interim End-User Search Interface Example and Sample Interim End-User Report) Feedback from users of this prototype interface played a major role in helping the Project evaluate their requirements. More controlled usability studies are now underway, in consultation with interface design experts and programmers, as the next step in the process of constructing a permanent user interface.

The end-user interface re-design will not affect ongoing data entry and management functions of the Project, due to the structural separation between the back-end and front-end layers.

There are a variety of methods of delivering on-the-fly information from databases over the World Wide Web; most translate HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) form submissions into SQL, and the result set from the database back into HTML. The SQL-addressable data in the Documentary Sources data repository can be exported to delimited text files for importing into other systems; it can have scripts or SQL queries run against it for on-the-fly retrieval over the Web; programs could be written or existing tools employed to map EAD elements to Documentary Sources fields for presentation in the XML browsers of the future.

In the Spring of 2000, the M.A.P. technology staff will begin a systematic evaluation of a range of existing products (e.g. ColdFusion, Active Server Pages, ActiveX, Sybase OmniConnect) along with other mechanisms (e.g. custom CGI programming, XML options) for feeding the data to the user on demand at the level of detail and resolution appropriate to the user's need and to the delivery method.