Kean WWII Digital Library

A Freelance Web Development project to help the Kean University history department with their WWII archives.
Please view the website at www.worldwariiscrapbook.com.

The archives are a collection of letters from WWII soldiers written to a Kean librarian during the war.

This project was a continuation of the code developed by a Kean Student, where PHP was replaced with NodeJS, the UI was re-done, and more pages and functionality were added.

Functionality

On the backend, the app uses the Express server for NodeJS as well as MySQL to interact with a database of archive names, author information, and location coordinates.

On the frontend, the app uses Handlebars for templating and Bootstrap as a styling framework. The app also uses jQuery and AJAX for a more responsive user experience.

The scanned copies of the archives, soldier photographs, and text transcripts of the archives are hosted on Amazon S3.

The application also uses the Google Maps API to plot each soldier’s movement during WWII.

Cloning down the repo

If you wish to clone the website down and run it on localhost…

1. Ensure that you have MySQL and NodeJS set up on your laptop.
2. Once you are set up, cd into this repo and run npm install.
3. Then seed the database using MySQL Workbench.
   • The schema is found in models/db.sql.
   • Also double check that the localhost connection is correct in models/dbInfo.json.
4. Run the server with node server.js.
5. Navigate to localhost:8080 in your browser.

Future Kean Developers!

Feel free to fork this repo.
Then refer to the documentation stored in the keanwwiiscrapbook@gmail.com account.
The account’s Google Drive will contain a document with instructions on how to add yourself as a collaborator.

Screenshot