I am a technology teacher and a group of us are trying to find an easy way to create a library of documentation about applications we are teaching.

Since there is some distance between us and I am sure some copyright issues we would probally need something that is secure and available over the web.

I am thinking along the lines of something similar to the XML database that is behind iTunes. That way once the content is uploaded the description could be added to the metadata of the file and then we would have a searchable database.

I am wondering if anyone has any thoughts on an application tha might suit our needs? I have checkout some of the CMS and don't know if it would be easy to search and easy for multiple users to add to it.

Thanks in advanced for your suggestions.
Tadge

You should be looking for a web application with search capability. I would recommend using wikimedia (as used in wikipedia.org) which is a php script and storage is in files for images and MySQL for text. You can also roll your own with a simple web page that you write linking to a cgi script like mnogosearch, swish-e or swish++ . They are great for indexing text files, html and even some wordprocessing files. With a combination of techniques, you can handle content that you create or download.

These are not toys. I can index gigabytes in a few hours with swish-e although it takes a bit of RAM and fiddling to get it right. MySQL is a first-rate database, too. Search is very rapid. I can find phrases in a few seconds with SWISH-e. My index is over a gigabyte. The beauty of this technology is that you can set up a website with whatever data you want, and add the search capability so users can search and access through the web browser, instantly. A bunch of 200 gB drives RAIDed can be very useful.

I never thought of a wiki. From the sounds of it I should be able to set it up and store files within a directory that could be accessable via ftp or http, so that people could put their documents there, and then they would simply be able to create links to that document.

Most of the people I would be working with are Mac or PC users and would have created their handouts this way. I will definately look into the wiki. We will be developing it hopefully over the next year. Since we are all educators we try to stick with the KISS principle (keep it simple stupid). Thanks for the suggestion and I am sure you will see another post if I run into problems

Thanks
Tadge