Miskatonic University Press

Access 2009. Saturday #1: Mark Leggott, Virtual Research Environment: Two Years Later, or, Islandora Takes Shape

conferences

Almost done now. There were four talks at Access on the morning of the last day, which was just a half-day. The opener was by our host Mark Leggott, who runs the University of Prince Edward Island library system. See also Peter Zimmerman's notes and the video of the talk.

http://islandora.ca/, customized Drupal-Fedora thing.

He wants to build capacity. Staff capacity, capacity on the island, etc. With library at forefront. Data stewardship: more than curation.

People at UPEI tell them: "This is the first time someone has responded to the data challenges I am facing."

"There is no more significant opportunity for academic libraries in the next few decaides."

"It's all about the local. Google can't do local like you."

Open source/open data.

Islandora: Seven people working > 50 of their time, soon to be over twelve. Used in research at UPEI ($150K hardware and $200K staff), administration (senate, document management pilot), learning (digital collections, LOR).

In the listing of everything in a given repository, everything has a B beside it, which means "post to a blog about this." It sets up everything they need so they can easily say something about the paper with a link to it etc.

Islandora External. People outside are using it: U North Texas, Guelph, Carleton, UNBB, Georgia Tech. Interest from others.

The framework: Fedora: repository layer, all the data and metadata. Drupal. Islandora: the glue that joins them. Drupal module, PHP and Java apps. Rule engine for flexible workflows. Drop-in support for new modules. XACML filter.

SHERPA. Djatoka. Going to start using R. Abbyy.

Workflows very important. Can help researchers automate them, which they like. Lots of drudge work in science labs and automating it saves everyone, including lab students, time.

Solution packs: "assemblages of collection policies, disseminators, workflows, apps, data."

They're working with Sun. Going to sell boxes with Islandora already installed on it.