Service: custom development and web-design
Solution type: web application
Customer: Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskij Dom) of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Business area: science; culture; online document storage
Period: 2003-2009; currently on maintenance stage
Key problems
Russian Institute of Literature is one of the largest centers for storage and research of Russian cultural heritage. The institute hosts one of the largest archives of ancient Russian manuscripts and documents in different languages, incl. Ancient Russian.
The Institute had to solve a number of huge tasks:
- Publication of a huge number of documents in different formats and languages (incl. ancient Russian manuscripts, such as birchmark manuscripts); creation of information storage for the archive, which made essential to automate the process of loading information;
- A special challenge was connected with the need to maintain “parallel texts”. The library had a number of documents which were organized in a certain file structure where original texts and their translations into modern Russian were prepared in separate documents. The customer needed a tool to facilitate conversion of these documents into html pages with parallel texts on one page.
Solution
Arcadia’s team created a stable and user-friendly portal with original web-design capable to store an unlimited number of documents. It consists of several web-sites with ~ 7000 pages and more than 200 ths. unique visitors per year:
- www.pushkinskijdom.ru — IRLI library portal, information portal of the institute;
- lib.pushkinskijdom.ru — electronic publications;
- web-sites of departments (odrl.pushkinskijdom.ru, xviii.pushkinskijdom.ru;
- tribute sites (lotman.pushkinskijdom.ru, panchenko.pushkinskijdom.ru).
The web-site was launched in 2004 year and since then has been showing robustness and user-friendliness both for visitors and administrators (librarians and scientific workers adding information to the web-site).
To solve the second task, Arcadia’s team developed a special tool which scanned the directories with the documents containing original texts and their translations and creating html documents for each original text with the parallel translation on the same page.
Development tools
- MS Visual Studio 2003/2005
- MS SQL Server 2000/2005
Technologies used
- DotNetNuke
- MS SQL Server 2000/2005
- MS .NET Framework
- VB.NET, C#
Duration and scope
~6 years / ~1 person-years