Dear Tim,

We have been asked to quote for doing some work on a university journals
site and have a few questions.

They want a full-text, boolean and fielded, search engine on their site
(Fields would be title, author, abstract, keywords etc.). The documents
would be in PDF format. There would be about 150 articles to search
across.
How easy/hard is this? What software would you need? Pricing? etc.

They want to be able to click on a PDF icon and then download the file
after entering a subscription number and having this verified.
Would you therefore need to know what kind of database they store this
info in before you could say how easy/hard/expensive it would be to do?

They also want an automated emailer where you enter details of the
journals you're interested in and then get notified when the latest
version is available. This will need an automatic unsubscribe feature.

The site the clients like is: http://www.journals.cup.org/
They want something similar - don't tell me that it's crap that way,
that's what they want!!! They've turned down a number of other
suggestions and tenders so they're obviously fussy.

Can you look at this and tell us how much you'd charge to set this type
of thing up, bearing in mind the points above.
I expect you'll want to ask lots of questions like what server etc. are
they using. They don't know much and it's all sort of up in the air at
the moment but we can ask if you like.

I'm sending you an email by the way and not going through your site
because we don't know whether it's going to come to anything or not.

Dave

PS
Know much about XML?
Folio 5 may well be in XML but this is just a rumour so don't quote me.