Open Sourced Cataloguing Packages?

mcse_knowthyenemy asks: "I am cataloguing a HUGE private collection for a magician (No, we cannot waive a wand...) with an item count of at least 100k. The end result will be a searchable website. There are several Windoze packages that fit the bill (item data ad nauseum, image inclusion, reports, website). But these invariably requires numerous Microsoft products plus IIS. So, any input on a solution that is based on Apache, instead?" There are plenty of cataloguing and e-Commerce bases out ther that would work for this, one only has to perform a quick Freshmeat search to find them, however this being a museum, maybe there are better options? Would you use the already available software for this sitution or would you write something custom, instead?

Comments

LDAP

[babbage]

Set up an LDAP server. I'm just learning about it myself, but it seems to be designed for just this sort of thing. (Well actually no, it looks like it might be designed for phonebook / addressbook type applications, but this sounds like a close corollary to that model.) There are lots of tools available for running LDAP in conjunction with web servers, database servers, command line interaction, GUI interfaces, programming APIs, etc.

Poking around a little, it looks like there's a good (but old?) FAQ from Netscape, though there some other sources of information out there.