This presentation was provided by Maria Stanton of The American Theological Library Association (ATLA), during the NISO Webinar "Open Source Publishing Technologies: Current Status and Emerging Possibilities" held on August 14, 2019.

1. Atla’s choice for NOVA: Open Source all the way
Maria Stanton
Director of Production
mstanton@atla.com

2. NOVA - background
Research Tools: Atla Religion Database® (Atla RDB®) — the premier index in all fields of
religion, as well as AtlaSerials® (Atlas®), and AtlaSerials PLUS® (Atlas PLUS®) — the go-to
full-text collections of journals in diverse areas of religion and theology.
Early 2000s – Atla licensed a cataloguing software solution to support our editorial
workflows; challenges:
Atla did not represent a typical “customer” – hard to get needed enhancements
Did not fully support for Unicode
Did not support an XML output

3. Technologies Atla Adopted
Software packages:
Drupal 7 (Data storage, API driving)
React.js 16 (User interface)
Elasticsearch 1.5 (upgrade to 5 soon)
Python 3 scripting and maintenance
LAMP server stack:
Linux - Debian Stretch
Apache 2.4
MySQL 5.5 (on 5.6 soon)
PHP 5.6 (upgrade to 7.4 soon)

4. This is a Longer TitleUnicode
• Support ~40 languages
• Reflect the original
language of the text
• Provide authority variants
for various terms (e.g.,
corporate and personal
names)

5. This is a Longer TitleVariants
ElasticSearch has been
enhanced since our launch
Authority variants used to
be harder to search for and
display …
Now it is easy

6. Structure of the team
Tech team:
Site Manager
Two developers
QA & Packaging / Reporting staff
Product Owner: M. Stanton – NOVA’s end-users are the Editorial staff
Redmine ticketing system – managers prioritize enhancement / bug fixes

7. Pros and Cons of our choice
Pros:
Flexible – community engaged in improving the tools
Continuous improvement: Engaged in-house tech team
Tailored to our specific needs
Cons:
First release, some of our needs could not readily be met by the tools at the time
Upgrades – team has to stay on top of the implications (no one is doing this for us)
Neutral ? Budget each year for enhancements / upgrades. Not sure how that compares to a
licensed solution.

8. Thank you!