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