Managing Digital Collections at Albion

Mid-Michigan Digital Practitioners

Fall 2015

The Backstory

The Backstory:

  • Digitized student newspaper from microfilm
  • How to make it discoverable & browsable?
  • Use case for a digital repository

Evaluation Time

The Contenders:

  • DSpace
  • ContentDM
  • Omeka
  • Islandora

The Contenders:

  • DSpace not flexible enough for end users
  • ContentDM too $, not flexible enough for staff
  • Omeka not robust enough for preservation
  • Islandora 

Evaluation Time

We had a winner!

What next?

How to get a working instance?

  • Build In-House
  • Outsource to DiscoveryGarden, ?
  • Other options?

Outsourcing, Round I

  • Campus IT didn't have the resources to build
  • Spoke with Islandora users at MSU, Grinnell
  • Outsourcing didn't seem like a great option:
    • Expensive
    • Backlog at DiscoveryGarden
  • Wanted to try to build in-house
  • We decided outsourcing wasn't for us

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!

Metadata!

We had a hole in our bucket

Albion College Photo Collection

  • Inconsistencies between box numbering systems
  • Multiple metadata editors/stakeholders
  • Cleanup/publishing is ongoing
  • Currently ~300 photographs in the repository (of 700 total)

Albion College Pleiad

  • Digitized run of student newspapers
  • Little extant metadata
  • Programmatic metadata creation/ingest difficult without Islandora server access
  • Manual processing and uploading
  • Currently ~850 issues in the repository (of 2000 - 3000 total)

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
Made with Slides.com