We offer on-line document libraries that we create and maintain for clients and up to now have left the design and hosting to a subcontractor but would now like to take more control of the situation. We can do basic web-design, but do not have programing skills and are interested in establishing a relationship with someone who can fill this gap.

Let us start off with a simple application.

If you go to www.merline-demo8.co.uk you will see an example using EU public domain documents, but they suffice as an example of what we do. Main features of what we want are as follows:

1. In the search form, top left, user enters a text string which is within the title of the document he or she is looking for – in the example on the web site, it was for all documents with “Financing” in the title.

2. The results are displayed in a table below the search form, which is a mockup of how we would want it presented.

3. There is a link to the documents, scanned and saved in PDF format and contained in a folder called Documents in the site.

4. The titles and file identities are held in a table called Doclist within an MySQL database in the site – the attached csv file contains the data.

5. By clicking on any of the search results, the user can open the document in the main frame to the right of the results.

This is a basic model that I would like to be able to replicate for multiple clients with different document types but with the same basic requirement – i.e. to retrieve by searching on a single metadata field.

For this simple case, we can set up username and password security with the tools provided by my hoster.

There could be more complex models to follow, for instance multiple user classes, the ability to add, delete and modify documents and metadata, content word searches over libraries using standard Adobe tools, automated upload routines, etc. So there could be a lot of ongoing business for the right business partner.