DLF Forum 2017

Islandora: Community and Collections
Martha Tenney(1), Robin Naughton. PhD(2), Audrey Sage Lorberfeld(2), Joanna DiPasquale(3), David Keiser-Clark(4), Adam Traub(5), Margaret Graham(6), Diego Pino Navarro(7)
1: Barnard College, United States of America; 2: New York Academy of Medicine, United States of America; 3: Vassar College, United States of America; 4: Williams College, United States of America; 5: University of Rochester, United States of America; 6: Drexel University College of Medicine; 7: Metropolitan New York Library Council
 
This panel will invite discussion of Islandora as a tool for creating projects that broaden access to and bolster preservation of important collections as well as an open-source community that lowers barriers to entry for small institutions developing digital library programs.

Islandora is an open-source software framework designed to help organizations and their communities of users collaboratively manage and discover digital assets. Islandora was originally developed by the University of Prince Edward Island's Robertson Library, but is now implemented and contributed to by an ever-growing international community. This panel will invite discussion of Islandora as a tool for creating projects that broaden access to important digital collections as well as an open-source community that lowers barriers to entry for small institutions developing digital library programs.

Panelists will discuss difficulties associated with developing robust, standards-based digital collections on small budgets with few developers as well as recent efforts  to make Islandora adoption more attainable. Panelists will specifically touch on Islandora projects that engage critically and creatively with hegemonic narratives in order to surface lesser-heard voices from their collections. This panel will bring together multiple threads often separated in digital library discussions: development, design, accessibility, curation, metadata, linked open data, labor, and outreach. In addition to the focus on Islandora, this panel will also highlight the work of small institutions with one or fewer full-time developers on staff. Lightning-style presentations (a few minutes each) will allow for an extended panel discussion, audience questions, and conversation (with participants at DLF and with the broader community beyond DLF).

Lightning talks topics will include:

The Metropolitan New York Library Council has recently embarked on extensive Islandora development, looking toward Fedora 4 implementation. Using real-world library use cases, this discussion will place Islandora in a wider repository context and explore a how it fits into the landscape of linked open data and national projects such as DPLA as an open, out of the box, multidisciplinary, multi-content driven platform for collaborative data sharing and publishing. 

The New York Academy of Medicine Library is in the process of transitioning from a ContentDM digital collection website to an Islandora solution. Like many of our colleagues, the Library has limited resources (a team of two) but a strong drive to make our collections available to the public. Working with a vendor for implementation and maintenance has made it possible to begin the process of installing and designing a site that can be managed by a small team. 

Islandora Enterprise (ISLE) is a new project in development that addresses significant pain-points in Islandora: installation and maintenance. ISLE separates an institution’s customizations from core code, and moves that core code into containers that are easily updated, simplifying and largely automating the process of installation and updates/maintenance of Islandora. ISLE lowers the barrier to entry for new organizations while allowing existing institutions  to reallocate funds towards development or ingestion instead of maintenance. 
  
The University of Rochester River Campus Libraries assembled a collaborative team of Digital Humanities practitioners, a manuscript librarian, web developers, and graduate students to create the May Bragdon Diaries Project. Unlike most diaries, May had pasted inclusions (photographs, correspondence, ephemera, etc.) right on top of her manuscript, requiring a unique data model and viewer to retain their physical context. Built on Islandora, the team built a platform that immerses the user into the world of May’s diaries.

The Drexel University College of Medicine Legacy Center’s Doctor or Doctress project uses Islandora to make history more accessible to a high school audience through guided exploration of primary source documents. Using extended description as metadata, the site encourages users to closely examine document evidence and draw their own conclusions about women in American history. 

The Barnard Digital Collections, an Islandora site, have been live since October 2014; in 2017 we are undertaking a redesign of the site with an emphasis on accessibility, broadly defined. We will discuss usability and accessibility assessments, focusing on the population of students who are not only primary creators of much of the material in the collections but also collaborators in digital projects and an important audience for the digital collections.