Richard Shrake spoke about the American Philosophical Society's digital repository migration from CONTENTdm to Islandora.

1. Quick and Dirty Islandora
Richard Shrake
American Philosophical Society

2. Overview
The APS has recently begun the migration from
ContentDM to Islandora
• Why
• Requirements
• Results

3. Why Islandora?
• Beefs with ContentDM
– Expensive
– Proprietary
– Preservation concerns
– Disconnect between datastreams
– Clunky interface
– OCLC’s development schedule

4. Why Islandora?
• Based on Fedora Commons and Drupal
– Fedora has the management chops
– Drupal handles the design
• The combination provides a free, open-
source, preservation-minded digital repository

5. Why Islandora?
• All web-based interface
• Based on concept of content models: Your
usage matures with your skills – build what
you want
• Out of the box support for major file types
(large images, sound, pdf) and interface
enhancements (OCR, jpeg2000, flash in-
browser content)

6. Why Islandora?
• File management is paramount
– A digital object is comprised of as many
datastreams as you desire (original
file, presentation file, relationship
metadata, preservation metadata, one or many
descriptive metadata files, etc.)

7. Why Islandora?
• Involved and helpful user community
• Responsive developers
• You can go to PEI for user conferences!

8. Islandora Requirements
• Linux administration knowledge
• Drupal administration knowledge
• Metadata standards knowledge (MODS and
DC)
• A willingness to read error logs
• DIY ethic

9. The APS Experience
• 10,000 objects in ContentDM
(audio, images, and text)
• Spent about 4 months testing and learning
Islandora
• Migrated all audio in about a month (4,700
recordings – over 1 TB!)
• Migrated about a 1/3 of images (deliberate
process – fixing errors)

10. The APS Experience
• Lots of trial and error in building forms to
upload new content
• Currently adding new audio content
• Currently working on security processes for
sensitive materials