About ResourceSpace

New! Watch the introduction video for an overview of ResourceSpace.

Overview

• Your users serve themselves so your internal workload is reduced.
• Resources are found easily and quickly.
• You can respond faster to external resource requests
• It's much easier to send your resources to those that need them without using up your own bandwidth: suppliers receive links via e-mail so they can download the resources themselves directly from the system.
• Higher quality resources are promoted so use of your best resources is encouraged.
• A centralised and well organised repository encourages the re-use of purchased resources.
• Only a web browser is needed - no cumbersome client software installations.
• Collaboration is encouraged through the use of shared resource collections and searches.
• Discover and respond to trends by using the detailed reporting and statistics functionality.
• Open source - released under a BSD style license and is therefore completely free of charge, and you are free to develop the product further without any restrictions.

User Benefits

• Intuitive interface - a visually rich, user focused interface to support you in accessing and organising your resources
• Pure web interface - manage and share your resources through your browser, no application install required.
• Standards based - works with current browsers on all the popular platforms.
• Simple and advanced search - the main search panel is available on every page allowing quick and intuitive access to the resources while the comprehensive advanced search lets you to focus your search and you are looking for. Use the 'search for similar' options to find other resources based on those you have selected.
• Intelligent search ordering - resources are scored against each keyword using user search activity
• Resources - detailed resource information, thumbnails and visual previews help you find the best and most relevant resources.
• Organisation, collaboration and distribution - tools to organise your resources, share with colleagues on projects and distribute to others; no longer any need to e-mail large files.
• Direct access to resource files - resources can be downloaded to your computer in a variety of sizes so your users can choose if they require high quality print files or lower quality screen / web resolution files.
• Themes - pre-selected groups of the best resources.
• Page by page browsing of PDF files using Ghostscript.

Administrator Benefits

• Permissions - set resource access level by user group.
• Research services - allows specific requests to be made to a central resources team.
• Archiving - resources can be archived and are then not visible in the main search.
• User contributions - allow your users to submit resources directly, which can then be processed by a central team before being made available to other users. Ideal for remote-working photographers.
• Multilingual - the application is multilingual capable with most major European languages supported.
• Batch file editing means it's easy to work with the metadata for large groups of resources.
• Batch file upload using either Flash or Java based uploaders - upload large resource sets using nothing but your web browser.
• Automatic thumbnail creation for hundreds of image and document types including JPEG, GIF, PNG, PDF, TIFF Photoshop PSD, InDesign, OpenOffice using ImageMagick. Support for most digital camera raw formats using dcraw (view full list)
• Automatic video thumbnails and Flash video previews for most video file types using FFmpeg.
• Automatic EXIF/IPTC/XMP header import and export using ExifTool.
• Minimal hosting requirements - uses PHP/MySQL technology which is supported by all major hosting providers.
• Plugin support - third party developers can create plugins to extend functionality.

Requirements

If you wish to host ResourceSpace yourself (instead of using third party services), you will be pleased to hear that the application uses straightforward PHP and MySQL and therefore works with the majority of hosting platforms without modification. The GD graphics library is required for automatic JPG/PNG/GIF thumbnail creation however this has been bundled with PHP since version 4.3. Installing ImageMagick and FFMmpeg will add further thumbnail support for hundreds more image/video formats.

Product History

The application was originally developed for Oxfam GB by Neale Hall and Dan Huby of Montala Limited and is in daily use by their internal resources team to manage and distribute over 60,000 photo, text and video resources. In the summer of 2006, Oxfam released the product under a BSD-style license and since then significant further development has been funded by a variety of organisations around the world.