What is Thalia?
Thalia is a Web 2.0 image management application with a rich client UI and a highly visual and intuitive interface. It is designed to support departmental image management, publishing, as well as individual and academic use.
What happens to files stored in Thalia?
- Uploaded user files are stored on ISDA's very reliable servers and backed up daily.
- Thumbnails and intermediate versions of the images are automatically generated in JPG format by Thalia.
- Thalia supports multi-layered images such as Photoshop files, generating single-layer web-readable images for browsing.
- The original files are always kept in their original format, and access to them can be separately controlled.
What can users do in Thalia?
- Users can upload their own images into libraries, individually or in bulk, apply Dublin Core metadata, custom metadata, and tags.
- Users can search for images, then drag and drop images from the search results into Albums, or Slideshows, which are images grouped for some particular purpose.
- Images can belong to more than one album, can have unique captions for each album, and can be ordered within the album.
- Albums can be turned into slideshows.
- Slideshows can be downloaded and displayed offline.
- Users can save their searches and re-execute them with a click of a button.
- Departments can request their own domains from the central Thalia service, and with ISDA assistance, can customize their domain, define their own metadata values, and create custom metadata fields and options to extend the metadata model.
- Users can apply access controls to libraries, albums, slideshows, and saved searches which they administer, allowing others to read, write, download of original file, and administration.
- ISDA offers a highly available service, with regular backups and redundancy of servers.
How does Thalia differ from Dspace?
The Thalia service differs from Dspace, a digital asset service offered by the libraries, the following ways:
- the UI is highly visual and "desktop-like", supporting drag-and-drop, slider tools, item and group selection, etc. DSpace uses more of a 'card catalog' style of UI.
- users can customize their metadata values and assign tags to images.
- Dspace metadata is fixed.
- users can group images into collections for their own purposes, caption them, order them, and make slideshows out of them. Dspace does not have this application concept.
- users control access rights to content that they can administer
- the content is not curated in any way; users directly upload their own content which is not reviewed by Thalia operations staff
- the Thalia system is high availability, but does not have the long-term preservation features offered by digital archives, specifically:* - images are not checked for 'bit rot' by constant background checksum evaluation
- - content formats are not monitored by the system and then automatically converted to new content formats
- - all items in Thalia are accessible via REST style URLs which are relatively stable and not mapped to specific machines, but a "guaranteed URL" service is not provided