LoomWare

It pains me to say this after a number of good Loomware years, but it is increasingly challenging for me to keep Loomware updated, so I am "archiving" the site with this post - leaving it open but making the last post the one that says "No more posts!".

Islandora Scholar Institutional Repository Solution Pack

Islandora Release 7.x-1.3 Series #1

Background

The Islandora Scholar Solution Pack is one of the most feature rich and long-awaited components of the Islandora ecosystem. Scholar is an IR (Institutional Repository) or general-use document repository, ideal for preserving and promoting the scholarly output of your institution or a special collection of PDF documents. While Scholar may seem like one of the newest solutions in the Islandora stack, it has been evolving for a long time. It is one of the first Islandora installations, and started with UPEI's original IslandScholar.ca site, which went live in December 2008, and continued with the 2nd generation IslandScholar.ca (launched in 2012) that reflects the version you see today. This effort has been greatly enhanced with the contributions from over a dozen installations (including a number of customized ones) with similar goals - the management of rich citation data and associated digital documents. discoverygarden inc. and its development team led this current effort, re-writing code, adding new features and pulling a host of different efforts into one coherent package. Nick Ruest, the Release Manager for this latest release also put a lot of effort into getting the new version ready. Scholar's genesis also provides a deep well of stories of the effort that has gone into it. One particular story that comes to mind was when I was on leave from UPEI setting up discoverygarden, and working with one of our first clients, the City of Hope Cancer Research Hospital in California. I was sitting on the deck of our 2nd story room at the Blomidon Inn in Wolfville Nova Scotia, where my wife Trina and I were attending the APLA Conference, having a glass of local red wine, and I was talking on the phone with Andrea Lynch, a librarian at the City of Hope. We were working on the details of the Citation Style Language integration and how it was "mangling" some of the citations, depending on the chosen style. I was explaining some of the challenges of integrating a number of 3rd-party open source applications and making sure the polish was sufficient to meet the requirements. Andrea and I were debating the relative merits of spending time to modify code to get it right now, or wait for the code maintainers themselves to fix it for us. We ended up taking a bit of a hybrid approach, fixing some of the key issues, reaching out to the maintainer to see if they would consider making some changes, and deciding to live with some of the issues. This one surfaces frequently because it illustrates one of the fundamental yin/yang characteristics of an open source framework: the push and pull (literally and figuratively) of the ability to change the way the system works when it doesn't do what you want. Sometimes this is critical to making it all work at the local level, but it can be at the expense of ease of maintenance and migration to future releases. Ahhh, choice...

Feature Set

The Scholar Solution Pack (SPs are Islandora's way of packaging standard functionality, metadata forms, sample data and data transformations) provides a substantial out-of-the-box feature set in a highly customizable framework. You can run the full stack as a local install on your own hardware or in a complete turnkey and fully supported cloud service like discoverygarden's Islandora OnDemand.

• rich bibliographic citations with a customizable MODS form
• auto-generation and updating of Dublin Core records from the MODS
• powerful keyword or fielded searching
• customizable Solr facets including a bar-chart range date facet display
• customizable citation display and export that leverages the CSL (Citation Style Language) standard that underlies Zotero and Papers
• add citations to "My Bookmarks" and export a CSL citation as TXT, PDF, RIS or RTF
• MARCXML export
• multiple ingest formats for batch records (MODS, DOI, PubMed ID, Endnote XML, RIS) which should accommodate pretty much any requirement
• fillable permission statement form on ingest
• ability to upload a PDF file with fulltext indexing
• ability to set embargoes on complete objects or just PDFs (allowing a public citation with an embargoed PDF)
• restrict Collections or individual Objects to specified IP ranges
• enhancements to increase indexing in Google Scholar and Zotero
• support for Coins
• support for SHERPA/RoMEO
• Collection management features, including the ability to share a citation with multiple collections, without duplicating the citation object
• setting your IR as an OAI-compliant repository

And these are just some of the Scholar features - when you combine these with the rich feature-set of the latest Islandora framework you can do a lot of creative things with the stack with little to no customization.

• link a digital asset in a separate Collection to a citation using the Compound Solution Pack
• create a compound scholarly record consisting of a citation, video, audio, and image files
• authenticate to your local Shibboleth system
• create new metadata editing forms to accommodate the full richness of bib records, or to present a different edit form to different users

Contributors

Like many efforts in the Islandora community, contributions can be intellectual (wireframes and functional requirements, code, testing and review, sysadmin tricks, documentation, posts to lists, or just good conversation) and/or financial contributions. Some of the institutional contributors to Scholar:

• University of PEI
• City of Hope
• Berkeley Labs
• University of New Brunswick
• Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries
• Fundacion Juan March

Scholar has also benefited from the skill and passion of the larger open source community, especially one I like to call "biblioland":

• the Citation Style Language Project
• citeproc-php
• bilbio
• bibutils
• Zotero
• OpenScholar

And of course the Drupal and Fedora Commons efforts! The open source world, a beautiful example of the intersection between global diversity and small/local.

What Does the Future Hold

I am looking forward to future releases of the Islandora project - feel free to drop me a note regarding top features you would like to see, or submit an idea to our Islandora IdeaWall. Some of the features that exist now in local customized Islandora Scholar installations, or are under active discussion, and will hopefully make it to an upcoming release include:

• supplementary data files (ZIP package)
• integration with Vireo
• integration with Altmetrics
• integration or sync to ORCID and/or an external VIVO datastore
• sync with a Zotero database, including the harvesting of PDFs
• additional import formats, like RefWorks XML
• harvest complete OAI-compliant datastores
• mint a DOI, ARC or Handle for each citation object
• create links between Scholar records and citation on ingest, based on the logged in LDAP user
• schema.org integration

Like any rich open source effort Islandora benefits from your ideas and resources. If you would like to support the integration of these or any other feature to make Scholar even better, I would like to hear from you. Next up in the Islandora Release 7.x-1.3 Series, why an Islandora Tuque will keep you warm AND allow you to get the most from the Islandora landscape.

Return to Blogging

It seems to me I have done this once (or twice) before, but I feel like it is time to continue blogging on Loomware. My Loomware blog started in February of 2004, so I guess I can call this the 10th anniversary and just get on with it!

One of the drivers for me was the incredible interest in the Islandora digital asset management system, which had its genesis in 2007 just after I joined UPEI. In the last 7 years Islandora has seen adoption in countries all over the world, and for a wide range of functions. I will start the posts next week with a series on the coming version of Islandora - 7.x-1.3, which is our way of saying the 3rd release of Islandora for Drupal 7 and Fedora 3. This new series will describe all the awesome goodness in the upcoming release, solution pack by solution pack, module by module and innclude some shoutouts to friends and colleagues who are giving their time and extpertise to build a great open source ecosystem!

Related articles

Notes from an Islandora Installation (aka Islandora Digital Edition Brain Dump)

Islandora's Open Source Ecosystem and Digital Preservation: An Interview with Mark Leggott

Our new Digital Library is Live!

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.

New Islandora 6 & 7 Releases Available

The Islandora team released 2 new version last week:

• Islandora 12.2.0 (the latest Drupal 6-compatible version) features a new version of the book solution pack, along with improvements and bug fixes to many other modules. You can read about all the changes in the release notes: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/ISLANDORA6122/Release+Notes+and+Downloads.
• Islandora 7 is the 1st release of our new Drupal 7-compatible release, and features a host of new behind-the-scenses changes, reflecting a move to help the community make better use of the Drupal part of the framework. 
  https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/ISLANDORA710/Release+Notes+and+Downloads

Islandora 7 makes use of the Tuque API and reflects our new testing approach. You can access Tuque and more technical documentation as well as test results at http://hudson.islandora.ca/.

We are proud of the new Islandora 7, especially with the 2-week sprint that we did prior to release. It has convinced us that there is no better way to focus on a big coding challenge and "get er done"! Many thanks to the DiscoveryGarden and UPEI teams for pulling this off. Expect more soon on the Islandora 7 front. 

Go to the Islandora downloads page to get the latest, or go to the Sandbox site (http://sandbox.islandora.ca/). The Sandbox site will be a good demonstration of the power of Islandora, as both Drupal 6 and 7 versions are running in the virtual machine and using a single Fedora instance. The 7 version is not quite ready so I will announce it when it is. 

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.

 

Islandora 7 Code Sprint Underway

I'm a little late in getting this out, but you know how it goes.

The University of PEI and DiscoveryGarden teams are hard at work on a 2-week code sprint to create the initial Islandora/Drupal 7 release. We have been so busy for the last year that this target kept slipping by, so we decided to go with the time-honored sprint+scrum approach - and I'm glad we did! The output of the team after a week and a half is incredible - you can follow their efforts via code updates at Github, or by following team leader Jonathan's Green's blog posts at the Islandora site.

The team is updating 2 test sites (1 ubuntu and one centos) as they code, providing a set of test sites for reviewing the latest developments. Some of the new features recently added include:

• a port of the Collection Manager Tool and integration into the new Collection Module (which will make the creation/management across the repo much easier);
• a complete port and improvements to the Islandora Solr Search module as well as a merge of the Advanced Search and Extended Search blocks;
• many tweaks to the display of images and collections;
• template approach to the display of metadata (using Drupal pre-processor and templating functions) to make the job of Drupal themer's much easier;
• support for Fedora's Enhanced Content Model Architecture specifically parsing of the DS-COMPOSITE-MODEL to determine what should be added to a collection;
• addition of a new Add datastream form.

The team will put their keyboards down this Friday and take stock, but based on what I've seen so far the new release will be awesome :-) More updates to come.

New Islandora Site in Italy

I want to start highlighting new Islandora sites as we come across them, so please let me know when you find or create a new site using the Islandora framework.

The BESS (Biblioteca Elettronica Di Scienze) Digital Archive is a new Islandora site in Italy:

Archivio digitale di BessBiblioteca digitale sulle trasformazioni sociali ed economiche del Piemonte e Torino | Digital library on the social and economic transformations of the Piedmont and Turin

The BESS team has also done a great job of documenting their effort on a Dev Page, including a comprehensive PDF guide to their processes. Excellent work and a good indication of what can be done using open source software!

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.

Michael Geist - Why Universities Should Not Sign the Access Copyright

A new post from Michael Geist is added to the positive message from the growing list of universities not signing the AC/AUCC "unModel" License. What more do Canadian universities need to make the only decision that is in the best interests of our institutions and learners?