This blog post accompanies my DH-Tech talk about config management. tl;dr : There is a recording available. Problems with infrastructure administration Operating an infrastructure can be hard. Among the most common problems is that of reproducibility, i.e. Is the documentation both current and correct? Is it clear how to do a fresh install or set up a secondary system? Another is that of uniformity, i.e. are there any standards?

Sometimes the most sophisticated deployment strategies and infrastructure models can unfortunatly not be shifted into the real life, so one has to go back a few decades and use tools from that time and mix them with current ones. In a former post I described a cool solution for building a static HTML website and putting it into a Docker image.

Since a couple of years we prepare applications for the eXist-db ecosystem based on the EXPath Package standard. Last week we setup the first test environment. No questions; no excuses: Tests are extremely important! In some cases one can start developing a software by specifying a test, so called Test Driven Development.

A Do-A-Thon event took place at the SUB on the 14th and 15th February that brought members from the Göttingen Campus and the Wikidata community together in order to dive into the world of Wikidata and pilot projects. For a research library a knowledge base like Wikidata should be of particular interest.

Web-scraping is ugly, but sometimes it may become necessary, because services don’t expose an API to retrieve data. Basically web-scraping is a mechanism to programatically open a website and grab the contents in order to using it for own purposes. The mission In one of our sites, we are using the HTML output of a not-that-hip-anymore-database allegro.

Well, this might be a catchy title. But what we are going to do, is to put the Jekyll artifacts into a Docker image and get a completely self-contained website. Jekyll, what? Artifacts? Ok, let’s start from the very beginning. Jekyll is a static website generator. This blog is run by Jekyll. That means, we do only have to edit markdown files and a ruby program generates everything around that and transforms the posts into a website.

It has been quite a while since the last version of SADE – the TextGrid flavoured version of the »Scalable Architecture for Digital Editions« – was published. Here is a new version, with a new deployment strategy and a complete new architecture. Everything is new in 2018. Once this version of SADE was derived from a development that Alexander Czmiel (TELOTA at BBAW) promoted in »Editio ex machina - Digital Scholarly Editions out of the Box«.

When going for Text Mining a collection of resources pretty much the first step is to check for the language. If it is a multi-language collection may be there is at least some metadata. At SUB we often use the METS/MODS standard based on XML.

Technology fails – at least sometimes. This is particularly true for a modern distributed research infrastructure, such as DARIAH-DE. For the operation of this infrastructure, we have implemented a monitoring solution with Icinga. This enables us to be informed about problems and react quickly.

Central Logging Service for Distributed Applications With the release of our great new presentation layer for the Goettingen Digitization Centre we faced new problems. The Application consists of many different separate services (and servers). For example a Symfony frontend application, separate applications to deliver and process IIIF manifests and images.