A web application for searching the Bristol Archive. It is intended to be a "unified interface" for accessing the Archive's multimedia collections, replacing the various existing search tools such as this and this. It is currently available here, though this may not be the most up-to-date version. Alternatively it can be run locally by following the below instructions.
It is being developed by a group of second-year Computer Science students at the University of Bristol.
First install Maven and MySQL. For the latter, be sure to set a memorable root password during installation.
Then clone this repository. Change into its root directory, then compile the
program with mvn clean compile package.
Then initialize the database as follows. Run:
cd src/main/sql/
Start MySQL up as root:
sudo mysql -u root -p
Enter password: .......
Do this at MySQL prompt:
drop database archivesearch;
create database archivesearch;
create user 'archiveuser'@'%' identified by 'YourDatabasePassword';
grant all on archivesearch.* to 'archiveuser'@'%';
use archivesearch;
source schema.sql;
quit;
Finally, start the program using mvn exec:java or java -jar target/archives-api-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar. Open a browser window, type
localhost:8011 into the address bar, and hit go.
Try the following example search terms in the search bar:
Cinderella, KAR, Uniformed soldiers, Trotter, Uganda
You should be met with a list of results. Click the name of a result to see its detail page. Click images to enlarge them, if present. Click the Back button in your browser to return to the results list, or the Home button in the website's NavBar to start a new search.
Click "Advanced Search" for more searching options. (Note that most items currently in the database are dated from the 1940s to the 1960s, and relate to various places in Africa, so if you search for dates and places outside of these then you may be met with no results.) Click "Date Range" to toggle between searching by a specific date and searching by a range of dates.
To modify the database, upload a CSV file (using commas as delimiters, and surrounding all values in double-quotes) with the column headings as shown below (in no particular order):
"Object Number"
"Department Name"
"Collection Name (General)"
"Collection Name (Specific)"
"Item Name"
"Extent (Archive Items)"
"Extent (Museum Items)"
"Description (Archive Items)"
"Description (Museum Items)"
"Location of Provenance (Archive Items)"
"Location of Provenance (Museum Items)"
"Date of Provenance (Archive Items)"
"Date of Provenance (Museum Items)"
The data describing Museum and Archive data may differ, so separate columns are provided to accommodate the differences. If an item comes from the Archives, for each piece of information (such as location or date), use only the columns labelled "Archive Items", and vice versa.
If your CSV file contains a line relating to an item that is already present in the database, then it will be updated accordingly.
Note that to upload a CSV file, you must first have an admin account. This can be provided to you upon deployment.
The Bristol Council and Archive logos are taken from their respective websites. All items in the database are copyright of the Bristol Record Office.
"At the Bristol Archives, we hold over 10,000 historical photographs and film from the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection. Archives staff are working to digitise and catalogue the collections in our collections Management system, Emu.
We wish to make the collections available to the public to search online, in order to raise awareness and generate interest in the collections. We would like a project team to build a prototype which will help our uses (both specialist researchers and non specialist) browser the collection and search the data in a user friendly and fast way.
Our database has an image APi and we can provide .csv files of the raw data. We are interested in any solutions which open up the database to researchers in novel ways, but also provide a detailed search option and are able to represent the hierarchical structure of archives in a tree view.
Any solutions to performance of database searches and multimedia manipulation would be interesting. We also have video and audio recordings as part of the archive."