CRMS: Copyright Review Management System

A web app and suite of tools for performing copyright review projects.

Table Of Contents

• About the Project
• Built With
• Prerequisites
• Installation
• Project Structure
• Functionality
• Usage
• Tests
• Hosting
• Resources

About The Project

CRMS is a web app and a suite of tools for performing copyright review projects. The primary purpose of the user interface portion is to allow trained reviewers to navigate, research, and enter data relevant to the ultimate disposition of HathiTrust materials whose copyright status can be investigated. CRMS also provides a convenient place to record licensing agreements (e.g., Creative Commons) with rights holders.

Copyright and licensing determinations ultimately get exported as text files for insertion into the Rights Database by parts of the HathiTrust infrastructure external to CRMS. CRMS does not have write access to the Rights Database.

The "suite of tools" refers to scripts that typically run as cron jobs to manage workflows. A copyright review proceeds via several stages (typically more than one person submits data independently on a volume) so there is a "nightly processing" stage which moves things along.

There are also scripts which only run (manually or otherwise) yearly, at around the time of the January 1 "public domain day" rollover at which time a swathe of works falls into the public domain or some other rights category.

Built With

• Perl
• MariaDB
• Template Toolkit

Prerequisites

• Docker
• Git ssh access to the repository

Installation

1. Clone the repo & cd into crms/

git clone git@github.com:hathitrust/crms.git
cd crms/

2. Pull the Post Zephir Processing Repo as a sub-module

git submodule init
git submodule update

3. Stand up the docker environment and run the tests.
   • This will run two database services and make sure that the local MariaDB connections are healthy.

docker compose build
docker compose run --rm test

Project Structure

• bib_rights two miscellaneous scripts related to bibliographic rights.
• bin For the most part these are actions and reports run as cron jobs
• cgi Main entry point cgi/crms as well as Perl modules and view templates
  • This is the directory most in need of reorganization. In future much of its content will be migrated to lib and views.
• docker Database seeds
• lib Perl modules (new development and refactored modules from cgi)
• prep Destination for some log files and reports
• scripts Testing wrappers run as part of development or by GitHub
• t Tests
• web Static assets including images, JS, CSS

Functionality

• CRMS has its own database, called crms, to which it has write access.
• CRMS also uses the ht database/view to which it only has read access.
  • In some cases it connects to the ht_repository database -- this is a legacy usage and we should standardize on using only ht wherever possible.
• CRMS does not follow an MVC architecture. Most functionality is exposed via a top-level CRMS object (cgi/CRMS.pm).
  • Lacking an object-oriented data model, most operations are or can be accomplished with the MySQL wrappers exposed by the CRMS object: SelectAll (aref), SimpleSqlGet (single value), and PrepareSubmitSql (for INSERTs).
  • Routines that retrieve database data tend to return data structures rather than objects. For example, $crms->Menus()
• cgi/crms is the main entry point for the CRMS web app.
  • There are a few other, more API-like, scripts in the same directory. They can be identified by a lack of file extension. Most return JSON.

Usage

Create a CRMS object.

# SDRROOT is the critical proprioceptive environment variable
use lib $ENV{'SDRROOT'} . '/crms/cgi';
use CRMS;
my $crms = CRMS->new;

Basic database operation: list all the HTIDs and their priority in project 1 (Core) queue

my $sql = "SELECT id,priority FROM queue WHERE project=?";
my $aref = $crms->SelectAll($sql, 1);
say "$_->[0], $_->[1]" for @$aref;

Get the current rights for a volume.

say $crms->CurrentRightsString("mdp.35112101180794");
# "pd/add"

Tests

• Tests are run by the previously-mentioned docker compose run --rm test command.
• By default the test service produces a Devel::Cover HTML report using scripts/test.sh. The other script, scripts/test_and_cover.sh, is for upload to Coveralls and is used in the GitHub action.

Hosting

• This is not hosted in the kubernetes cluster.
• Hosted in the Hathitrust web servers like the other Babel Applications.

Resources

• Two of the cron jobs (bin/pdd_collection*) talk to a Collection Builder script which is part of the monolithic babel app.
• Bibliographic queries are run against the HathiTrust Bib API in cgi/Metadata.pm.
• This also relies on Post Zephir Processing
• Copyright Review Program at HathiTrust
• Internal University of Michigan Confluence Page