After many months of development, I’ve made a new site live. It’s called the Global Health Repository, and is a repository for “[online] resources related to global health, with a specific emphasis on the contribution of nurses, midwives and allied health professions.” It’s currently sitting at the temporary URL of:
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ntzrlo/globalhealth/
In time, however, it will have its own domain name.
Features
For end-users, there are simple-to-use browse and search facilities and a tag cloud. There are two types of registered users: contributors and administrators, the former having permission to add and edit resources, the latter having godlike control over resources and users. There is no self-registration system as the client wanted to administer users herself.
The repository is exposed for ‘harvesting’ via a RSS feed ‘enriched’ with Dublin Core metadata. This means that its records can be harvested by external repositories, and individual users can subscribe to the RSS feed in their browsers or newsreaders to view repository resources.
Technicalities
The back end of the repository is centred around a MySQL database, with scripts in PHP Codeigniter creating the application. Authentication is via a modified version of the ion-auth Codeigniter library. The front end uses HTML5 and CSS3 for markup, based on the excellent Bootstrap framework to provide interface consistency and mobile-friendliness, as well as some interactivity. Other interactivity is provided by the jQuery Javascript framework.
Future versions
Although this is a release version, once the client has got contributors and end-users actively using the repository there will almost certainly be revisions and future versions. Watch this space…
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