WHY USE THE STREETPRINT ENGINE?
In an increasingly digital world, there are many benefits to moving your collection online. "Going digital" helps to preserve the longevity of fragile artifacts while still making them available to the world, and makes a positive contribution to the wealth of information available on the Internet as you reach new audiences. But exactly how can you transform your collection into a useable and valuable online resource?
The Streetprint Engine makes it easy. Sites powered by the Streetprint Engine offer a number of advantages
over conventional websites or custom-built alternatives:
- Free, open-source software.
Streetprint is built upon PHP
and MySQL, two industry standard
open-source software packages. This means that Streetprint
is also free, and more importantly, your Streetprint
site will not fall victim to planned obsolescence or other problems
associated with proprietary software. The inner workings of your
Streetprint site are yours to customize or upgrade
in the future. Read more about this.
- Plays to your strengths. Researchers and collectors rarely have the time or computer expertise to program
and maintain a website. If a consultant is hired to build it,
their knowledge leaves when their contract ends. The Streetprint
Engine's easy-to-use administrative interface makes maintaining and adding to your Streetprint
site as simple as filling out an online web form. It lets you focus on your collections rather than technical details.
- Community and consistency.
By basing your collection on the Streetprint Engine,
you join a growing, cutting-edge community of Streetprint archives.
All Streetprint sites share similar interfaces,
searching, and browsing functions, and when new features are developed,
your site can automatically take advantage of them.
- Geek-friendly! Because of its open-source roots,
The Streetprint Engine doesn't require any fancy
proprietary hardware or software — it will run on almost
any UNIX, Linux, Mac, or Windows web server with default installations of PHP and MySQL. Since the Streetprint Engine has been released under the GPL as an open-source project in humanities computing, you can even join our development team and add the features YOU want to see in the next versions of the Streetprint Engine.
