Islandora Implementation Nicole Garrett Smeltekop & Megan O’Neill Kudzia Albion College
Why Islandora? Runs on commonly-used open-source software platforms Fedora Open Commons Drupal Granular security and permissioning Active, library-heavy user community Allows editing and control of the public face We wanted to make it pretty ideally, but at a minimum we wanted it to be not ugly.
WHere We Are Fedora Open Commons installed Drupal with Islandora module installed Our Drupal permissions are goofy Currently possible to ingest objects into the Fedora repository
Our Challenges We’re getting a Drupal “Access Denied” error Devoting staff time to development is difficult Workflow and training management We are still considering other options Specifically we’ve run into some technical problems and we’re in the process of trying to resolve those. It’s taking longer than we’d hoped. We don’t have anyone on staff whose job is strictly devoted to working on or managing this project which means that development moves in fits and starts. Once we get a working instance, our next challenge will be to develop training and workflows. again for staff (and hopefully students) whose time isn’t strictly speaking allocated to this project. We really like Islandora but we’re still in the testing phase and we’re trying to decide how big to dream.
More Challenges We are working with: MSU Digital Curation (shout-out Aaron, Shawn, Devin, Lucas, and Eric!) Grinnell The Islandora and Islandora-Dev Google Groups The good news is that the user community is super helpful!
Where We’re Going We need an Institutional Repository to: Provide access and storage for digital objects (College publications, research, etc.) Maintain preservation copies as distinct from access copies Be easy for staff and end users to navigate Be not ugly Work for all our stakeholders (faculty, staff departments, students) Be migrate-able Right now, we believe that Islandora will do most of all of these things for us. We are a small campus so we need the system we adopt to be THE digital asset management system for everyone on campus. We like the potential for Islandora to link up with Archivematica to help us manage preservation copies of our data.