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ScholarSphere

ScholarSphere is a Ruby on Rails application utilizing the Blacklight and Hydra-head gems for integration with the search & indexing system, Solr, and the digital asset management platform, Fedora Commons. The application runs on Fedora 3.5.0 and Solr 3.5.0.

ScholarSphere is being developed as part of Penn State's Digital Stewardship Program. Development on ScholarSphere began as part of the prototype CAPS project. Code and documentation are freely available via Github.

For more information, read the ScholarSphere development docs.

License

ScholarSphere is available under the Apache 2.0 license. Read the copyright statement and license.

Install

Infrastructural components

  • Ruby 1.9.3 (we use RVM to manage our Rubies)
  • Fedora (if you don't have access to an instance, use the built-in hydra-jetty submodule)
  • Solr (if you don't have access to an instance, use the built-in hydra-jetty submodule)
  • A relational database (SQLite and MySQL have been tested)
  • Redis (for activity streams and background jobs)

Install system dependencies

  • libmysqlclient-dev (if running MySQL as RDBMS)
  • libsqlite3-dev (if running SQLite as RDBMS)
  • libmagick-dev
  • libmagickwand-dev
  • clamav
  • clamav-daemon
  • libclamav-dev
  • FITS -- put it in a directory on your PATH
  • ghostscript (required to create thumbnails from pdfs)

Get the ScholarSphere code

git clone https://github.com/psu-stewardship/scholarsphere.git

Install gems

bundle install

Copy config samples

cp config/database.yml.sample config/database.yml
cp config/fedora.yml.sample config/fedora.yml
cp config/solr.yml.sample config/solr.yml
cp config/redis.yml.sample config/redis.yml
cp config/hydra-ldap.yml.sample config/hydra-ldap.yml

If you're using SQLite, a vanilla Redis installation, and the Hydra-Jetty Solr and Fedora components (see below), you should not need to tweak the database.yml, fedora.yml, solr.yml, or redis.yml files.

If you're planning to use LDAP for user account information and groups, you will need to know some information about your LDAP service, which will go into hydra-ldap.yml.

Create database

rake db:create

(Re-)Generate the app's secret token

rake scholarsphere:generate_secret

Migrate database

rake db:migrate

If you'll be developing ScholarSphere, setup test databases and load fixture data

RAILS_ENV=test rake db:create
RAILS_ENV=test rake db:migrate
RAILS_ENV=test rake scholarsphere:fixtures:generate
RAILS_ENV=test rake scholarsphere:fixtures:refresh

To use the built-in Fedora and Solr instances, get the bundled hydra-jetty, configure it, & fire it up

git submodule init
git submodule update
rake jetty:config
rake jetty:start

Start the resque-pool workers (needed for characterization, audit, unzip, and resolrization services)

resque-pool --daemon --environment development start

Run the app server (the bundled app server is Unicorn)

rails server

Browse to http://localhost:3000/ and you should see ScholarSphere!

Usage Notes

Auditing All Datastreams

To audit the digital signatures of every version of every object in the repository, run the following command

script/audit_repository

You'll probably want to schedule this regularly (e.g., via cron) in production environments. Note that this does not force an audit -- it respects the value of max_days_between_audits in application.rb. Also note that if you want to run this on any environment other than development, you will need to call the script with RAILS_ENV=environment in front.

Re-solrize All Objects

If for some reason you need to force all objects to be re-solrizer, perhaps because you have updated which fields are facetable and which are not, ScholarSphere contains a rake task that kicks off a re-solrization asynchronously via a Resque job.

 rake scholarsphere:resolrize

Note that if you want to run this on any environment other than development, you will need to call the script with RAILS_ENV=environment in front.

Characterize All Uncharacterized Datastreams

In the event that some objects have not undergone characterization (for whatever reason), there is a rake task that sweeps through the entire repository looking for objects that lack a characterization datastream. For each object that lacks this datastream, a CharacterizationJob that will characterize and thumbnailize the object is queued up.

 rake scholarsphere:characterize

Note that if you want to run this on any environment other than development, you will need to call the script with RAILS_ENV=environment in front.

Export Metadata as RDF/XML

There is a rake task that exports the metadata of every object that is readable by the public to the RDF/XML format. This might be useful as an export mechanism, e.g., to Summon or a similar discovery system.

 rake scholarsphere:export:rdfxml

Note that if you want to run this on any environment other than development, you will need to call the script with RAILS_ENV=environment in front.

Harvesting Authorities Locally

ScholarSphere supports "authority suggestion," a feature that links controlled vocabularies to descriptive metadata elements. This provides functionality both for mapping string values to URIs and for populating dropdowns in metadata form fields, e.g., if a user types "Cro" into a subject field, they might see a list that includes "Croatian independence," the subject they were going to type out.

In order to avoid network latency, these vocabularies are harvested in advance and stuffed into the ScholarSphere relational database for easy and quick lookups.

To get a sense for how this works, pull in database fixtures containing pre-harvested authorities

rake db:data:load

To harvest more authorities:

  1. Harvest the authority (See available harvest tasks via rake -T scholarsphere:harvest) -- N.B. depending on the size of the vocabulary, this may take a very long time, especially if you're using a slower database such as SQLite.
  2. (OPTIONAL) Generate fixtures so other instances don't need to re-harvest (See available database tasks via rake -T db)
  3. Register the vocabulary with a domain term in generic_file_rdf_datastream.rb (See the bottom of the file for examples)

Contribute

  1. Fork the codebase e.g. to https://github.com/your-username/scholarsphere
  2. Clone your fork locally (git clone [email protected]:your-username/scholarsphere.git my-scholarsphere)
  3. Create a branch to hold your changes (git checkout -b new-feature)
  4. Commit the changes you've made (git commit -am "Some descriptive text around what you've added")
  5. Push your branch to github (git push origin new-feature)
  6. Create a pull request e.g. at https://github.com/your-username/scholarsphere/pull/new/master