LoomWare

CDL, UCLA and DiscoveryGarden Partner on Islandora

The latest CDLINFO newsletter mentions plans to integrate the Islandora system with CDL's Merritt backend:

In coordination with the UCLA Library and DiscoveryGarden, we are planning to move forward on work to integrate Islandora with Merritt.  UCLA will be conducting the development work using a forthcoming Islandora API, with consulting, testing, and project support from DiscoveryGarden and CDL.  Islandora is an open source digital asset management system currently under evaluation for implementation by the UCLA Library.  We are seeking to deploy Merritt as the preservation storage layer under Islandora’s Drupal-based system, in place of Fedora, which usually fills that role.   We will prepare documentation, to assist other Islandora implementers with this process, once the project is completed.

DiscoveryGarden is looking forward to working with CDL and UCLA in demonstrating the flexibility of the Islandora approach and the value of an open, collaborative development process.

iPad App for Islandora Repo Now Available

Our new iPad application, Telling Island Stories, is now available in the App Store (and yes it does support the retina display). TIS is a front-end to a number of Islandora-based digital collections, with a focus on story and geo-level presentation of digital assets. As a lightweight iPad app it will give you a good example of what can be done with a powerful Islandora-Fedora driven backend. Some highlights of this version:

- provision of "collection" views via Media (images, audio, books, maps), Stories (associated subsets of assets) and Communities (assets sharing a geographic range);
- a map-based view of all assets, including media-specific pins, pin aggregation for larger numbers of items in close proximity (including the ability to turn this feature on and off), search/display via the map;
- flexible display including ability to toggle metadata display on and off by item, filter items by type;
- delivery of high quality retina-display quality books in a page 

Items available at launch include photographs from the University of PEI and community groups, herbarium specimins, digital books from the Lucy Maud Montgomery Institute, oral histories from the Dutch Thompson collection and maps from UPEI and partner organizations. As content is added to the Islandora system it automatically shows up in the app - no need to download a new app just for new content. A future version will allow the user to submit content to a central repository.

We are especially proud of the collaborative approach to making content from all parts of Prince Edward Island available to the world. If you are visiting PEI this summer you definitely want to download the free TIS app to your iPad!

TIS is a joint development venture between UPEI and DiscoveryGarden, an Islandora services company, along with generous funding from Innovation PEI. If you are interested in adapting the TIS app to your own Fedora/Islandora framework drop me a note.

 

UPEI Senate Approves Open Access Policy

After a lengthy but very fruitful process UPEI's Senate approved a new open access policy. Some highlights of the policy:

• immediate deposit of scholarly articles (including faculty, grad student and undergraduate works) in the UPEI repository is encouraged (a mandate was not considered a viable option - next time...);
• encouragement for scholars to retain copyright, including a reference to the SPARC addendum;
• deposit of research data into a UPEI Virtual Research Environment is also encouraged, along with links to the final scholarly work.

IslandScholar.ca is the UPEI open access repository, and it is currently undergoing a major re-architecture with a new launch this summer. The UPEI effort is also a key part of the new Islandora Institutional Repository Solution Pack, which will be released this summer as well.

AIMS White Paper Available

The AIMS project has released their white paper, which has some great reading on the issues and challenges facing institutions as they embrace the avalanch of born digital content. From the e-mail release:

AIMS (Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship) was a two year grant generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It ran from October 2009-September 2011. An international collaboration of partners from the University of Hull (UK), Stanford University, Yale University, and the University of Virginia as lead, AIMS had several main goals, among them:

1. Develop a methodology for the support and stewardship of born-digital materials 

2. Foster and enhance the digital archivist community

3. Process over a dozen collections that had born digital content.

4. Create and disseminate a white paper that outlines our findings and work

To that end, I am pleased to announce the successful conclusion of both the grant and the white paper. The white paper is an expression of our methodology for supporting and stewarding born digital materials. The participants used their experience in processing collections with born digital content as the groundwork for our shared (rather than singular) approach.  As such, it highlights decision points and practice. It is meant to introduce and expose readers to the issues of born digital stewardship, not necessarily solve every possible contingency since this is an evolving challenge for us all. We have articulated practices that are informed by archival principles that we hope will have a broad reach to our readers.

This document should be considered as a framework to guide good practice in terms of archival tasks and objectives necessary for success. 

The AIMS white paper can be found here:

http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/

 

NOW AVAILABLE: Fedora GSearch Version 2.4.1 | DuraSpace

NOW AVAILABLE: Fedora GSearch Version 2.4.1 | DuraSpace

The latest GSearch is available and includes some very nice new features: use of Tika for metadata/text extraction; support for Solr/Lucene 3.5 and ability to embed RISearch queries in Solr/Lucene. 

Update: Islandora 11.3.1 | Islandora

I know, this is a month old, but it is the latest Islandora release :-)

Islandora has been updated to version 11.3.1. This minor release addresses a bug in the 11.3.0 release - all users of Islandora 11.3.0 should update to 11.3.1. More details can be found on the Release Notes and Downloads page.

via islandora.ca

New Islandora Release for Q1 2011

The Islandora project announces an RC1 candidate for our Q1 2011 release

The Islandora team has been working hard on the 2011 roadmap, and the new RC1 is just the start. We are actually up to release 11.1.1, which is a bug release for the 1st 2011 release. We will be following suit with a new VM in the next few days, so stay tuned.

via islandora.ca

US NSF Data Dissemination and Sharing

The NSF policy framework for sharing/disseminating research data is worth a look, of only as a best-practice approach for any research program. Some quotes from the site:

Investigators are expected to share with other researchers, at no more than incremental cost and within a reasonable time, the primary data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of work under NSF grants. Grantees are expected to encourage and facilitate such sharing.

Beginning January 18, 2011, proposals submitted to NSF must include a supplementary document of no more than two pages labeled “Data Management Plan”. This supplementary document should describe how the proposal will conform to NSF policy on the dissemination and sharing of research results.

via www.nsf.gov

New DuraCloud Beta Released

Thinking about moving your ILS to the cloud? Wondering how you are going to manage all that research data over the next few decades? You may want to keep your options open and work with an open system like DuraCloud from the good folks at DuraSpace. DuraCloud is open source and yet works with common commercial cloud systems (currently Amazon, AWS and Rackspace) and provides a number of useful features for building an enhanced repository infrastructure.

The Islandora team will be piloting DuraCloud for a number of use cases, including running the entire stack in the cloud, so stay tuned for new developments on that front.

Retooling Libraries for the Data Challenge

A good piece from Dorothea Salo on the opportunities and challenges facing libraries in providing effective research data stewardship. From the Conclusion:

None of the challenges presented herein should discourage librarians from engaging with the research data challenge. Our unique expertise in metadata, digital preservation, public service, and technology translation will serve researchers well, as will our sturdy common sense and the domain expertise of our subject librarians.

However, unless we proceed with clear understanding of researchers and their data, as well as our own systems and habits, we will simply trip over ourselves. Research data are too important, and our role in curating them at present too insecure, to allow that to happen.

As we are discovering at UPEI, Fedora has proven to be a very effective tool in meeting this opportunity.