Managing Digital Collections at Albion

Mid-Michigan Digital Practitioners

Fall 2015

We had a winner!

What next?

Building Ourselves

Essentially, we discovered that:

• Islandora installation is quite complex
• We didn't have the staff time to dedicate to installing and maintaining ourselves

So Where Were We?

• We had a great use case for a digital repository
• It was too expensive to outsource
• It was too difficult to build ourselves

We tabled our discussions for a few months, and then...

New Vendor

LYRASIS started offering Islandora SAAS!

Outsourcing, Round 2

We Signed Up

Let the games begin!

Digitized Candidates for Ingest

• Student Theses from around 2011
• Video?

Upcoming Candidates for Digitization

• Io Triumphe (alumni magazine)
• The Albionian (yearbook)
• Additional photograph files
• ?

Islandora Project Current Status

• Possible areas of growth:
  • Collections that could be easily added
  • Others who could be trained on the workflow
  • Other growth stuff
• Current bottlenecks include:
  • Lack of funding, with regard to:
    • Scanner
    • Sending materials out to vendors
    • Personnel

Islandora Challenges

• Turnover in Archivist and Web Services positions
• Transition plan
• Documentation and training

Things Going Well

• Existing projects going well
• Awesome staff -- Jennifer!

Challenges with Joining Islandora Project

• Training 
  • Initial webinar in December 2014
• Documentation
  • Specific metadata requirements decided 
  • Instruction guide followed
• Ingest/workflow policy
  • Folders labeled in 9-year increments
  • Work from oldest to newest

More Challenges

• Tracking progress
• Quality control checks
• Learning to make corrections/edits
• Islandora organized files by month, not year

Setbacks

• Search display:
  • All January volumes for 9 year span listed before February volumes, etc.
  • Quality control checks are time-consuming