Quick and Dirty Islandora

Richard ShrakeAmerican Philosophical Society

Overview

The APS has recently begun the migration from ContentDM to Islandora

• Why• Requirements• Results

Why Islandora?

• Beefs with ContentDM– Expensive– Proprietary– Preservation concerns– Disconnect between datastreams– Clunky interface– OCLC’s development schedule

Why Islandora?

• Based on Fedora Commons and Drupal– Fedora has the management chops– Drupal handles the design

• The combination provides a free, open-source, preservation-minded digital repository

Why Islandora?

• All web-based interface• Based on concept of content models: Your

usage matures with your skills – build what you want

• Out of the box support for major file types (large images, sound, pdf) and interface enhancements (OCR, jpeg2000, flash in-browser content)

Why Islandora?

• File management is paramount– A digital object is comprised of as many

datastreams as you desire (original file, presentation file, relationship metadata, preservation metadata, one or many descriptive metadata files, etc.)

Why Islandora?

• Involved and helpful user community• Responsive developers• You can go to PEI for user conferences!

Islandora Requirements

• Linux administration knowledge• Drupal administration knowledge• Metadata standards knowledge (MODS and

DC)• A willingness to read error logs• DIY ethic

The APS Experience

• 10,000 objects in ContentDM (audio, images, and text)

• Spent about 4 months testing and learning Islandora

• Migrated all audio in about a month (4,700 recordings – over 1 TB!)

• Migrated about a 1/3 of images (deliberate process – fixing errors)

The APS Experience

• Lots of trial and error in building forms to upload new content

• Currently adding new audio content• Currently working on security processes for

sensitive materials