Technology Overview

The LHC technology platform can be summarized as follows: web-oriented, standards-based, and open-source.

Web oriented
The web will be used as much as possible as it has compelling benefits. It allows broad participation in the LHC activities as patron, volunteer, or employee by allowing easy access from anywhere in the world. All that's needed is a browser, whether accessing from inside or outside the office. By moving as many of the office processes, databases, and communications to the web we dramatically improve the access to this information for everyone involved in LHC.

Keeping data on the web server is also safer, since it's hosted in a world-class datacenter with nightly back-ups, fault-tolerance, etc.

Standards-based
LHC will use relevant standards as much as possible. This includes XML as the basis of all collection data (eg. archives, oral histories, photographs, etc.), EAD for the archival encoding, OAI-PMH for exposing our repository, XHTML for websites, OpenDocument for documents and spreadsheets. To this end, there will be pages in this book describing the standards that apply and how LHC uses them.

Open Source
Open Source software (OSS) has enormous benefits for LHC. Besides being free, it is better quality, more secure, less vulnerable to viruses, improving faster, well supported by a lively community, and completely open. Since openness is the central philosophy of OSS there is no attempt to lock us into a proprietary file format or keep others from adding value to the software. This leads to maximum flexibility for the future. For these reasons LHC has chosen OSS as for a web content management system (Drupal), Archival storage system (Archon), Membership management (CiviCRM), Internal operating system (Ubuntu Linux), Office productivity applications (OpenOffice), Web browsing (Firefox), Email (Thunderbird), Image processing (GIMP), Audio Editing (Audacity), Page layout (Scribus), Illustration (Inkscape).

In addition, LHC has adopted the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) as the web technology of choice, and seeks to have all of its web-based systems utilizing this stack. Since LAMP-based web hosts are ubiquitous and cheap ($6/mo) it is easy to host this technology. It is also much less expensive to develop using these technologies than, say, Java. By sticking with LAMP as much as possible we limit the number of technologies that we have to understand and maintain. Drupal, CiviCRM, and Archon are all LAMP-based, and we are looking for a LAMP-based image repository system.