Albion Digital Document Archive System

Welcome to the Albion package home page. The goal of the Albion project is to provide a digital document indexing system to enable easy distribution of photos and presentation material in a wide variety of formats for a variety of computer systems.

Specifically, it is designed to:

• generate a browseable index of image and document files.
• allow users to (extensively and accurately) label the images,
  and
• allow easy distribution of the index collection, specifically over the web and on removable media (e.g. CD or Zip disks).

Albion is a set of CGI Perl scripts that use ImageMagick for all of the image processing.

Features

My wife has worked with a local animal rehabilitation facility for many years. To record the progress of each animal that enters the facility, many pictures of the animals are taken each week. After some discussion, it became clear that they needed a system to organize those pictures with the following features:

spell checking

Because the search utility will miss some documents/images if the labels are misspelled.

presentation preparation

Animal cases are often discussed with other groups around the country. One request from the researchers was to automate "adding a logo" to the pictures so they could spend more time on content rather than image editing.

basic image editing

rotations, etc...

easy printouts

Each animal has a (paper) case file, and it should include pictures. Albion provides an HTML/web interface to ImageMagick's montage utility.

flexible distribution

At an organization where folks have varied computer skills, one can't always rely on The User having a internet connection. So, Albion allows one to

• download the database, edit it off-line, and then upload the changes
  and
• deliver a browsable/searchable index on a CD
  Ideally, this CD should work on as many computing platforms as possible. Windows/Linux/Mac is the target, but full featured functionality is only available for Windows at this writing. If any MacPerl users have suggestions on how to make this work, I'm eager to hear them.

You may be asking... "Why would anyone want to build another image thumbnail generator when there are so many other good ones already out there?" For the answer, read my thoughts on the technical merits of the Albion system.

Future Direction

My own archive now holds 6000+ records, and the flat file database approach is giving way to slow searches. So I plan to rewrite the search script to use SQLite (or merge with another suitable project). SQLite stores the data in a single file (as opposed to MySQL/PostgreSQL), so it should give faster search results while still allowing distribution of the archive on a CD.

Hosted by SourceForge

About the name - The project is named after one of my favorite places... the Albion basin in Little Cottonwood Canyon. Just up the road from Alta and Snowbird, it's also the inspiration for the snowflake motif. You can find more picutres of the Albion basin by searching google.