I'm working with the Russell County Historical society. They are swimming in a sea of paper and desperately need a database so they can digitize some of their images, films and the copious papers they have about the history of Russell.
I need something that is:
Off the shelf
Not windows based
can be administered via web (would be nice)
Is relatively simple to enter data into and get data out of since most of the people working with it are little old ladies.
Is there anything Open Sourced that you guys have worked with that doesn't suck?
<Sidenote I learned today that is way super cool>
The Russell Kansas school system is the only school system in America that was never segregated. In fact, the school system had a black teacher in the 1870's.
</Sidenote I learned today that is way super cool>
So nobody knows of something that might work?
Its a big ask
Off the shelf
Open Source
Not Windows
Web and Desktop (presumably Mac) - If I understand correctly
Accept windows as an option and drop the 'web' requirement and there are loads (not that I am up to date with them)
Or go 'web only' and there are probably quite a few on hotscripts.com
Actually, that's exactly what I want: web only...assuming it doesn't use a stupid windows server. (I refuse to use windows servers for anything.)
I use a combination of MySQL, MySQL Workbench and ATK (http://www.atk-framework.com/). Build the database first in Workbench, then built the interface in ATK. However, I'm a reasonably competent code monkey, and there's a learning curve with ATK. This is nowhere near as rapid as, let's say, Microsoft Access. I agree with 4Eyes, this is a big ask.
I wrote half a reply. I actually have a historical biographical database online with about 12,000 entries, but it was built from scratch 10 years ago.
I could make it work with Drupal using a bunch of plugins. The big problem is search on specific fields.
So, your components would be
Drupal
Views
Content Create Kit (CCK)
Imagefield
ImageCache
Those plugins thus far are considered pretty standard and all but Views are part of core in D7 I believe
Then you could use exposed Views filters (essentially, search on a specific field) and perhaps custom search (http://drupal.org/project/custom_searchhttp://drupal.org/project/custom_search)
But
1. this wouldn't be ideal
2. nothing you do with Drupal is ever really "off the shelf" especially if you want an interface that grannies can run.
Other than that, I can't think of anything.
I was thinking about this as well. It's the sort of thing we produce for people a lot, so I was particularly interested in whether anyone would come back with a package answer!
What you are describing is pretty much a typical requirement for custom db development. Our usual solution here would be mySQL database with a php/ zend framework front end. Depending on how many information types you are dealing with and how complex you want retrieval to be it could be a fairly simple job.
For something off the shelf you probably want to stop thinking of "database" and think more about the problem you are trying to solve. Database is pretty all encompassing term. For instance there are a lot of off the shelf document management solutions, media storage solutions etc. each is backed by a database, but you'll never find them searching for a database.
I'm also wondering if you're overthinking this - and don't even need a solution? Hatred of windows aside, the truth is that most little old ladies are much happier working in an environment that they pretty much recognise and for most of them this is going to need to look and feel like a windows app.
Does it even need to be custom? if it's literally just storing scans of images, films and papers you just need to be able to upload scans of these into a well organised file system, no? Does it need to deal with tagging and searching, or are they all ex filing clerks who'll find papers by working through a series of files rather than searching anyway? Perhaps you just need some online storage, a decent naming system and file organisation, and to see how that goes before you try and get an all singing solution they won't use?