The Showcase team is currently led by Paul Steele and has been worked on by the following people:

• Philippe Bechamp – system programmer
• Bill Best – system administrator
• Celena Bretton – sub-editor
• Audrey Droisen – former manager
• David Hooper – media digitiser
• Keith Lauchlan – web developer
• Judith Lennox – sub-editor
• Diane Rodgers – research assistant

The Showcase was built using the following Open Source Software and applications:

• the Linux operating system
• the Apache webserver
• a MySQL database
• the PHP programming language.
• the eZpublish content management system

Furthermore, The Showcase has been developed following World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines.

Open Source refers to computer programs in which the source code is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design free of charge, i.e., open. Open source code is typically created as a collaborative effort in which programmers improve upon the code and share the changes within the community.

The metadata schema has been developed with the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative in mind. Dublin Core metadata is a set of widely adopted interoperable metadata standards and specialised metadata vocabularies for describing online resources that enable information management systems to be better designed. The Dublin Core metadata standard contains fifteen elements which have been established through consensus by a cross-disciplinary group of professionals from the library, museum and computer science communities. Metadata is ‘data about data’ such as the Director of a video, the Producer, the Date Created and so on.

The Showcase metadata schema has also been designed to be compatible with the work of the European Broadcasting Union and their Core Metadata Set for Radio Archives (http://www.ebu.ch/tech_32/tech_t3293.pdf). The metadata schema that the Community Media Association (http://www.commedia.org.uk) has developed with, principally, OneWorld (http://www.oneworld.net) and Amarc International (http://www.amarc.org) is called the Shared Online Media Archive. SOMA developed and extended both the Dublin Core and EBU set to cover multimedia archives such as the Showcase and can be viewed here – http://soma-dev.sourceforge.net/

Linux is a freely-distributable open source Unix-type operating system developed originally by Linus Torvalds but now worked on by thousands of volunteers. Linux has become an extremely popular alternative to paid-for commercial operating systems due to the fact that it is free and because it can run on so many different platform architectures.

The Apache HTTP Server Project is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows NT. The goal of this project is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in line with the current HTTP standards.

The Apache HTTP Server is a project of the Apache Software Foundation.

MySQL is a very popular and very powerful open source database used all over the world. A database is a collection of information organised in such a way that a computer program can quickly select desired pieces of data – in other words, an electronic filing system.

MySQL AB themselves say: "MySQL AB is the company that develops, supports and markets the MySQL database server globally. Our mission is to make superior data management available and affordable for all, and to contribute to building the mission-critical high-volume systems and products of tomorrow. We have made our product available at zero price under the GNU General Public License (GPL)”.

PHP self-referentially stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor and is an open source, server-side, HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages.

PHP is different to a client-side language such as Javascript in that the code is executed on the server. With server-side execution of code, the client only receives the results of running the script with no way of determining what the underlying code may be. The client is screened from the mechanics of how a site works which is not actually relevant to the user’s experience of the website. This has the added benefit of enhancing the website’s security.

eZpublish is an open source framework for content management, sharing and collaboration. A content management system (CMS) is an application that enables content on a website to be added to or otherwise manipulated. As websites become ever more complex and database driven, it is inefficient, impractical and impossible to run and build large sites by hand when pages can be dynamically built ‘on-the-fly’ using a CMS. A CMS enables the creation of better-organised information management systems by allowing the data to be arranged and searched for in a number of complex ways.

The documents located at http://showcase.commedia.org.uk were checked and found to be valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. This means that the resources in question were identified as ‘XHTML 1.0 Transitional’ and that we successfully performed a formal validation using an SGML or XML Parser (depending on the markup language used).

The Showcase website conforms to Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 (CSS2) standard. CSS2 is a style sheet language that allows authors and users to attach style (e.g., fonts, spacing, and aural cues) to structured documents (e.g., HTML documents and XML applications). By separating the presentation style of documents from the content of documents, CSS2 simplifies Web authoring and site maintenance.

CSS2 builds on CSS1 and, with very few exceptions, all valid CSS1 style sheets are valid CSS2 style sheets. CSS2 supports media-specific style sheets so that authors may tailor the presentation of their documents to visual browsers, aural devices, printers, Braille devices, handheld devices and so on. This specification also supports content positioning, downloadable fonts, table layout, features for internationalisation, automatic counters and numbering, and some properties related to user interface.

The Showcase has been designed to conform the Triple-A level of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/), including all Priority 1, Priority 2, and Priority 3 checkpoints defined in the Guidelines. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities. Conformance to these Guidelines will help make the Web more accessible to users with disabilities and will benefit all users.