Introduction to – Islandora

Introduction to

Islandora

Official Definition

Islandora is an open-source software framework designed to help institutions and organizations and their audiences collaboratively manage and discover digital assets using a best-practices framework.

On a Philosophical Level...

Islandora is Open Source

Anybody with the knowledge/skills/time can contribute to the code, making it better for everyone.

No one owns it, but the non-profit Islandora Foundation oversees its maintenance and development as well as community activities.

Islandora is Open Source

This means that we get to control, at a local level, how our software is used.

Islandora is a Community

There are a bunch of people all over the world working on the software, making it better, and helping each other out.

Islandora is a Community

If you have a problem, you can check the documentation, post to the Google Group, chat with colleagues on IRC, or talk to someone you know to help you fix it (or hack it).

On a Technical Level...

Islandora is a Sandwich

It's a bundle of smaller things squished together between two giant open source platforms - Fedora (storage) and Drupal (display).

Islandora is a Sandwich

Fedora is where we store all the stuff. It's really good at keeping everything safe and secure.

Islandora is a Sandwich

Drupal is the website that the rest of the world sees. It's really good at letting us build cool things like galleries, maps, exhibits, and timelines.

Islandora is a Sandwich

Islandora brings Fedora and Drupal together. It adds a ton of important functionality through its solution packs and modules.

So What's Inside?

Solution packs for storing and presenting common types of data.

Audio · Basic Image · Book · Collection Compound Object · Large Image · Newspaper PDF · Video · Web Archive

So What's Inside?

Modules that let you perform various actions on that data and/or the attached metadata, such as:

Batch ingests · Alternative content displays Preservation (Checksum, FITS, BagIt, PREMIS, etc.) Image annotation · Optical character recognition And much more!

So What's Inside?

A discovery layer that provides robust searching and indexing using Solr and GSearch.

How Islandora Works

Every piece of content in Islandora is an object - a collection, an image, the page of a manuscript. Objects can be containers for other objects.

How Islandora Works

Each object contains several datastreams that describe the object or add elements, like a thumbnail, to create functionality.

How Islandora Works

Objects relate to each other in a number of ways. An object can be part of a collection (hierarchical) or we can define flat (graphical) relationships.

How Islandora Works

Metadata is information about the object - the data about the data. This can be descriptive, technical, or refer to relationships that the object has with other objects in the repository.

Islandora was built to use MODS, a flexible schema developed by the Library of Congress for books.

How Islandora Works

Islandora makes it really easy for you to create metadata by providing handy forms!

What We Do

We* take care of the technical side of things - we'll configure the repository, set up any solution packs, modules, and dependencies that you need, and keep the code up to date and working properly.

What We Do

We'll* also train you on digitizing content for ingestion into Islandora and how to create metadata using the MODS forms.

What You Do

You add the content! You select items from the archives to digitize, you come up with consistent ways of turning your archival information into MODS, and you upload the items into Islandora.

Next Steps

• Digitization plan: new content vs. migration, strategic areas of focus
• Local metadata: how will things like subjects and archival locations be entered?
• Website: any customizations need to be discussed with UofT

Hat-Tips

• Kirsta Stapelfeldt and Nick Ruest's presentation from the OCUL Digital Curation Summit 2014 (as well as many, many more by those two and others)
• The Islandora and Discovery Garden websites, blogs, documentation, and Github repositories

Fine Print

This presentation is licensed CC BY 2.5 CA meaning that it can be copied, redistributed, remixed, transformed, and built upon for any purpose as long as proper attribution is given.