Archiving Talk

Our needs

• Storing a diverse corpus of audio, video, pictures, books and text.
• Digital archive exists since 1985 but contains data from before. It started with the original Macintosh.
• We have data and software that:
  • Is programmed in strange programming languages.
  • Uses niche databases.
• Our system needs to handle a variety of Indic languages and scripts.

Jnanam DB

•   ~16 years ago we started Jnanam DB
• We sent a monk to university to learn how to organize information. This was designed after he came back.
• Based on the Dublin Core.
• Objectives:
  • Minimize the amount of joins.
  • Able to store anything with the current schema.

Main table called item

has 88 fields

🙀

 

It currently holds 8.000 items. Not much for a database.

Each record has a type

'text/book',

'text/booklet',

'text/review',

'text/quote',

'audio/chant',

'audio/inspiredtalk',

'audio/song',

'audio/podcasts',

'audio/instrumental',

'audio/shum',

 

'app',

'video/pubdesk',

'video/travel',

'video/teaching',

'video/ritual',

'video/building',

'video/talk',

'video/news',

'external/page',

'art/photography',

 

'art/painting',

'art/drawing',

'art/vector',

'slideshow/external',

'slideshow/galleria',

'slideshow/vr',

'audio/book'

We have our own desktop app to manage the database