"Breaking up with CONTENTdm" with (in part) Blacklight and Fedora/Hydra

[Tom Cramer]

All,

This quarter's issue of the Code4Lib journal includes an article co-authored by Heather Gilbert and Tyler Mobley on how the Lowcountry Digital Library (South Carolina) went from CONTENTdm to an OSS stack powered in part by Blacklight, Fedora & Hydra components. (Now we know what Tyler has been up to!)

http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/8327

It's a wonderfully rich, narrative case study. Of particular interest to me were the observations on the software and community, and also some opportunities for us.

• the site is a seamless blending of a Drupal site with Blacklight query and search results pages, and a Fedora backend, with content loaded via Rutgers' OpenWMS
• installing and running Fedora was not the hurdle one might fear: "For an installation of our size, configuration and installation of Fedora is fairly straightforward." 
• Some Hydra adopters would benefit from a bulk ingest client to "to batch ingest from a spreadsheet (ie: tab-delimited text files)" and "allows the user to import metadata using an in-house schema". They ended up going with OpenWMS from Rutgers. 
• "We did receive great help and advice from the Hydra and Blacklight user groups. In fact, we would not have gotten past many initial hurdles in understanding the logic and structure of the discovery interface without them."

The punchline in the conclusion is perhaps most telling: 

"We had essentially two people to work on the project, very little programming experience, and minimal financial support. However, the scale of what a small group can do in open source library projects has exploded in recent years. Thanks to the work of the likes of the Fedora, Rutgers’ OpenWMS, Drupal, Blacklight, and Hydra development groups, we knew the tools existed to produce the digital library we wanted."

http://lowcountrydigital.library.cofc.edu/

Great job, Tyler and Heather, on both the implementation and the article!

- Tom

[Tom Cramer]

Tyler,

I wonder if you might consider linking to the Lowcountry Digital Library from the Blacklight exemplars page? (It's a github wiki page, so you can add it yourself, if you feel bold.) 

https://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight/wiki/Examples

This, along with a link to your C4L article, would almost certainly be of interest to like institutions evaluating Blacklight as a potential solution for collection delivery. 

- Tom

Begin forwarded message:

[Tyler Mobley]

Tom,

Sorry, I didn't see your initial message on the group! We would be happy to add our links to the wiki. I'm out of the office until Tuesday, but I will be bold and add them then if that works. 

I'll be the first to admit that while we're pretty far along in our migration, I still consider the new site 'in progress' as I need to do some more code cleanup and bug fixing for performance, compatability, etc. 

I want to thank you and the group again for your help over the months. Especially for putting up with my variety of beginner questions over and over! I'll have appropriate links, etc on Tuesday.

Thanks,

Tyler

—
Tyler

[Tom Cramer]

Tyler,

We would be happy to add our links to the wiki.

Thanks so much.

I still consider the new site 'in progress' as I need to do some more code cleanup and bug fixing for performance, compatability, etc. 

I think this is true for all our sites! We're constantly working on SearchWorks...

I want to thank you and the group again for your help over the months. Especially for putting up with my variety of beginner questions over and over! I'll have appropriate links, etc on Tuesday.

Can I ask how long you think it took you to do the migration both in terms of calendar months and person months? It would be an interesting benchmark for others.

- Tom

[Tyler]

Tom,

Sorry, I've been catching up with email post-vacation. 

I'd say we initiated the actual migration in earnest about 10 months ago. We had tested some single item collections before that period, but we delayed the big migration until we had some sort of logic for compound objects figured out. CONTENTdm makes compound objects very easy to create, so deciding how to port our myriad compounds took some time. Additionally, due to an unfortunate server error that wiped a portion of our collections ready for ingest and index, a couple of those months were spent repeating work. Had that not been the case, I'd say about 8 months have been spent in migration.

Also, as we noted, Heather and I were not able to devote 100% of our time to the project. It accounted for a major portion, of course, but we each had our respective day-to-day duties and other ongoing projects in the library. If I come up with a more concrete number I'll certainly add it. 

Tyler