Notio: Vivaldi and BiblioCerberus functions in the same distribution

History

DefView

In 2007, DefView was released — a software for the secure pagination of documents that prevents unauthorized plagiarism. The system performed loading, viewing, printed pages, provided scaling, preview, rotation, and was able to invert page colours. The solution was monolithic. Therefore, with the growth of the number of clients and storage servers, control and management became more complicated.

Vivaldi

Vivaldi solved many problems.

• Access to texts using a browser or a client program via a local network or the Internet.
• Protection of documents from uncontrolled plagiarism.
• Differentiation of access rights based on document collections and user groups.
• Reading part of the text in demo mode.
• Generating statistics on the number of views, printing, loading documents, and individual pages.
• Creation of virtual reading rooms and the delegation of administrative functions.
• Marking pages with watermarks.

BiblioCerberus

In 2014, the first release of the BiblioCerberus web service took place. In 2015 — the second and third appeared. The service provided secure access to documents and third-party applications. Moreover, there were modules that enabled interaction with various electronic library systems (ELS). This allowed publishers and libraries to open secure access to their collections of documents to other organizations, which, in turn, embedded the collections in their electronic catalogues, while all documents remained protected on the servers of the copyright holders.

Universal Notio Platform

Over years of development and work of Vivaldi and BiblioCerberus, many components and modules have been implemented. Over time, it was decided to create a new product that combines the best qualities of Vivaldi and BiblioCerberus. Notio is a universal platform for the integration and secure storage of electronic documents.

Integration

In addition to its own web interface, Notio allows third-party applications to get full access to texts through the program's interface. For example, as an electronic catalogue and a tool for working with documents, it is possible to use a separate website that will request documents on a page-by-page basis using a special secure protocol ‘BiblioCerberus’. This protocol provides all the necessary functionalities.

• Getting information about the document and the number of pages.
• Getting the book's page sizes.
• Getting the content of the text's background.
• Getting a list of words with their coordinates on the page.
• Rasterization of the page with the specified DPI and watermark overlay.
• Extract a page from a book as a separate PDF file.

Authentication and authorization are carried out using the WS-Federation protocol.

The module relating to bibliographic descriptions already contains components for integration with the ELS (OPAC-Global, Aleph, MarcSQL, IRBIS, Koha) and is open for interaction with other systems.

Electronic network of libraries

Notio allows one to easily configure interactions with other institutions that use Notio. The parties can agree on the mutual or unilateral provision of access to their collections of documents and embed them in their electronic catalogues. Thus, users who are in the digital catalogue of one organization will be able to view the resources of both organizations.

The copyright holder manages the differentiation of access rights based on document collections and user groups while having access to complete statistics — which user from which portal accessed the document, for instance.

Notio Pro

Any version of the platform can open access to its materials. Only the Pro version can embed resources from other Notio servers.

Also, Notio Pro allows one to analyze the entire set of information from all connected Notio installations through a single interface. One may view statistics, settings, access rules, etc., being an aggregating node within a network of electronic catalogues.

Other benefits and features of Notio

• In addition to the PDF format, it allows the embedding of multimedia-graphic images, audio, video, and YouTube content.
• Full-text searching is supported for the entire array of documents, taking into account word forms.
• All document data is cached locally for high performance and load reduction for adjacent components.
• The web-based administration interface allows one to fine-tune access rights and view all statistics in various sections on the graphs.
• Horizontal scaling of the system — cluster mode. To do this, several servers with Notio are installed, and a separate load balancer distributes web requests between them, thereby reducing the load on each.

License options

Notio

This type of license has integration restrictions: the library gets the opportunity to open access to its materials, but cannot embed third-party content in its catalogue.

License options.

1. With a limit of 10,000 copies regarding the number of documents and the inability to enable cluster mode.
2. Unlimited documents, without the possibility of working in cluster mode.
3. Unlimited documents, with the possibility of enabling cluster mode.

Notio Pro

All integration features are included. License options.

1. The total volume of documents (including third-party embedded content) is 100,000 copies, while clustering is impossible.
2. Unlimited documents, clustering is not possible.
3. Unlimited documents, there is a possibility of clustering.