LAURIN (c) 2000-2004 by Gregor Retti

LAURIN

The LAURIN System is a software package for digital clipping archives.

LAURIN is the result of a project funded by the European Commission in the 4^th Framework (Telematics for Libraries), the Austrian Federal Ministry for Science and Traffic and - later on - the Austrian Federal Ministry of Traffic, Innovation and Technology. You may want to take a look at the original website of the project, which is in German and English as well as partly in French, Italian, Spanish and Swedish (pages will be selected according to the language settings of your browser!). You will find lots of information and reports there.

Software

LAURIN consist of three (or four) major parts:

• The LAURIN Database: the LAURIN Database is a sample of scripts to be run against an Oracle database. It installs the tables, synonyms, procedures, triggers and sequences as a core component of the LAURIN system and populates them with some basic data. The LAURIN Database is available for free: DOWNLOAD
  Version: 2.0.3 (2003-03-27)
• The LAURIN Interface Suite (LIS): the LAURIN Interface Suite is a couple of web-interfaces written in Perl, there are interfaces for indexing, searching and administrative purposes. LIS is available for free: DOWNLOAD
  Version: 2.0.6 (2004-01-23)
• The LAURIN Thesaurus: The LAURIN Thesaurus is a set of controlled vocabulary for indexing. It is designed to cover the majority of subject headings which can be found in newspapers.
  Check out a by-product of the thesaurus construction: WWW-NUTS (Countries of the EU up to 05/2005)
• libClip: The acquisition tool for scanning and clipping. LibClip is a commercial product, but has never been available on the market due to the responsible company's changed focus.
  Anyway, if someone would like to volunteer to replace this last commercial part of the LAURIN software with a free tool, this would be highly welcome. In that case you may want to contact laurin@psb1.uibk.ac.at

Note that the parts of the LAURIN System which are available for free may be downloaded, used and changed by anybody - but they may not be distributed, neither in their original nor in a modified form. See the licenses for details. Anyway, the licensing policy may change, if we are able to find a partner for a free scanning/clipping frontend. That may be the point to change the LAURIN System into real Open Source.

Documentation & Publications

Documentation for the LAURIN Database and the LAURIN Interface Suite can be found HERE.

A list of publications about LAURIN is avaliable HERE.

Testing

The LAURIN System is in production at the Innsbrucker Zeitungsarchiv - IZA.

Plans & To-Dos

Currently the development process for the LAURIN System has ceased. There are still and will always be some future plans, but ...

• Support a free database backend: This is only a plan, but wouldn't it be nice to have the LAURIN System with a free DB? Postgres will be the one to be evaluated ...
• Add some XML stuff: To make the LAURIN System capable to act as a XML-content provider, some XML output features should be added, e.g. to fetch an articles meta-data or a list of articles for a keyword ...
• Full text search: Maybe add a full text engine to deal with all that OCR data ...

Contact & Information

For suggestions, questions, and feedback please contact: laurin@psb1.uibk.ac.at

Last update: 2004-06-16