5. Technical Specifications

The technology for YMTDL is based on the ETD-db project at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ETD-db/). Yale has joined the VT ETD-db consortium. We have downloaded and installed Version 1.7c. Unlike Virginia Tech, who has the system installed on a dedicated web server, we have installed their software on our institutional web server (http://info.med.yale.edu) as a virtual host (http://ymtdl.med.yale.edu). This web server consists of a clustered pair of Compaq Alpha DS20s, each with 1 GB of RAM and 170 GB of shared disk space. The operating system is Compaq True64 5.1a. The web server software is Apache 1.3.2.7 with Perl 5.6 and MySQL3.23. We decided to use the existing web server to take advantage of the support structure already in place. This eliminates the need for additional hardware as well as the increased administrative overhead needed for a web server. The institutional machine is maintained by ITS-Med‘s Production Systems and Web Design and Development groups. The system is backed up nightly by our Tivoli Storage Manager system.

The software installation was straightforward. The changes we made were primarily in the configuration variables defined in the installation documentation. The only other changes we made were in the HTML headers and footers; we did this to give the site the look and feel of the Medical Library‘s site (http://info.med.yale.edu/library). It is clear that the developers at Virginia Tech spent a lot of time and careful thought in the design and implementation of this software. We would like to publicly thank them for making their code available to the rest of the Academic Community.

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