In front of the Library’s John Adams Building, the team that built the WDL “back end” are, from left, Daniel Chudnov, Andy Boyko, Babak Hamidzadeh, Dave Hafken, Ed Summers and Chris Thatcher. - Michael Neubert
Building the WDL prototype was a team effort, requiring dedication and long hours. In addition to a working application, a complete mirror site was sent via the Internet for installation on a server at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.
“Our biggest challenge was to build a dynamic repository of multimedia which had to be searchable and displayable in seven languages and with all the bells and whistles of a polished, state-of-the-art Web site—in only a fraction of the time it should normally take,” the team agreed.
Babak Hamidzadeh, who led this part of the effort, noted that, “In addition to a very high-skilled team putting in long hours, we were able to meet the hard deadlines with a short development period by using experience and technologies that we developed on other Repository Development Center projects, such as the National Digital Newspaper Program and the eJournal/eDeposit Project. Those projects will, in turn, benefit from new technologies (for example, multilingual search and browse) developed for the WDL prototype.”
