LoomWare

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.

CBC | Maritime Noon | Atlanta Trade Mission

A piece from February 8 with Joe Velaidum from DiscoveryGarden talking about the Atlantic Premiere's trade mission to Atlanta Georgia.