The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
I am in the process of building a web app and I know now I will need an electronic library of some sort external to the web app, so I am now looking for an open source library to plugin in to the webapp. Can anyone that has any experience in this arena please suggest some options. Greenstone seems to be the best I found so far (and the only one that seems to be built with to serve solely as a digital library), but I do not want to commit myself to just one. \ Edit:\ After some research I have found that what I actually want/need is a document management system with built in faceted search and the ability to manage and audit documents and probably relate them in some way. At this point I have only been feature skimming but I have also found: Knowledge Tree, E-Prints and 1 or two others that seem to match most of my criteria on one way or another. Though Knowledge tree claims to have an open source edition, I have been unable to find it so far to download for testing.
Dark Star1
Check out the Fedora Repository Project. It's an open-source digital repository with significant support from a number of institutions. Their "About" page lists that they have users from all these industries:
Don't ask much, do you? ;)
It might make the most sense for you to look at curation microservices and incorporate the ones you think you need into your system. You'll still need to bolt on search/browse separately, but as suggested above, Blacklight should make that feasible.
This a a rather broad question which may lead to several interesting hints and discussion but no concrete answer. What makes a "good" system is subjective unless your clearly name criteria on which to judge. If you look for a document management system(*) you may look for a wide bunch of functions such as storage, retrieval, metadata management, integration with other services... I bet that you don't want the all-in-one system suitable for every purpose (which may be Fedora) but for a dedicated, easy-to-use system that best fits your needs. For instance faceted search is a property of retrieval only: you can get faceted search with a search engine which does not manage any digital objects at all (maybe the discovery interface VuFind fits your needs?.
Can you please try to further describe your particular needs and re-edit the question, including the title?
Some comments on your current list of criteria:
This are properties of the retrieval and discovery interface. What do you mean by full text highlighting? Result snippets of full text as known by Google?
Clear criteria unless you distinguish open source and free software.
Very buzzy and fuzzy, I have no clue what you actually ask for.
(*) I added a link to the Wikipedia article to clarify what we are talking about. Unfortunately the Wikipedia article "document management system" does not clearly tell the difference and relation to terms like institutional repository, publishing repository, and digital library. Don't trust Wikipedia definitions unless you have edited them! ;-)
I'm going to give something of a contrarian answer - there isn't one and there shouldn't be! The problem is that the different parts of the stack change at different speeds. You generally want your backend store to change very slowly, so you know the data you've got is safe. Your ingest processes tend to be big phases of development followed by long phases of maintenance and use. Your access systems tend to need to change more rapidly and constantly, as you react to your users' needs. I suspect that this is why the open source solutions tend to focus on these three phases separately, so that each is modular and replaceable, rather than one monolithic system which can do everything and anything.
After much searching and deliberation I have settled down to testing four to five document management systems (DMS). I do agree with some of the replies that I have read about a DMS not being a monolithic solution but I do think that a DMS should, by default, imply some basic core functionality, such as faceted searching.
Now I know some people want would want me to explain this but I will summarize by just saying "library." In any case I am currently testing OpenKM, Knowledge Tree Community Edition, Epiware, Alfresco Community Edition (once I can get it to run) and I am thinking to add Fedora (formerly DuraSpace) to the mix of tests. Some of these use the Solr and Apache Lucene search technology, and Solr I know is an excellent search engine.
Have you tried DocFinity from Optical Imaging Technology? I use it for my finance department. It includes work flow solutions to streamline AP and AR functions. It is easy to use.
Initially we had tried OpenKM, but reached a number of documents (actually a few hundred thousand) we found ourselves in trouble. Fortunately we found LogicalDOC, a very similar software with regard to the graphical interface but more performant on large amounts of documents.