What does Islandora mean to you?

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Audrey Sage Lorberfeld

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Aug 23, 2017, 11:06:26 AM8/23/17
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Hi Everyone, 

A panel including myself and many other Islandora community members is presenting on Islandora, our community, and some use cases at DLF this year. We would love to share with the DLF community what Islandora is in the words of our entire community. So, if you all could comment on this post with answers to the question "What does Islandora mean to you?" that would be fantastic! I think I am going to try to make some type of visualization out of this data. 

Thank you! 

Warm regards,
Audrey Lorberfeld

Amanda Lehman

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Aug 24, 2017, 2:10:05 PM8/24/17
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Hi Audrey,

I'm not sure what format you want, but here's some plain text of me trying to think in keywords :).  

To me Islandora is an open-source content management software framework (or stack?), based on a lot of software components that developers and the IT department installed, and accessed by Drupal, Fedora, and Islandora software for different levels of users.  It is supported by the community, so I feel a responsibility to try to participate in the community, but it is hard to do this as my position has not morphed with our Islandora needs.  The system itself is my chosen tool for managing, archiving, and sharing general digitized content and now datasets from our University.  I would love to do more with it, but the learning curve for working with customized systems like ours, the bugs, and the ongoing system support needs are limiting my content management success with the system.  

[Background] We started in a consortial setting and when that consortium dissolved we took on support of our Islandora instance with a contracted developer me as a repository manager, and IT support as needed.  There has not been enough support to maintain a healthy repository and with leadership and staffing changes, we've lost most of our development support.  All of this happened, of course, soon after we started up a second instance of Islandora which we use as a data repository.

Our sites just in case you want those:


We'll be at DLF as well, so I will look forward to your presentation, good luck with it!
Cheers,
Amanda Lehman

Mark Jordan

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Aug 24, 2017, 5:53:13 PM8/24/17
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Hi Audrey,

Nice open-ended question! To me, Islandora means:
  • Enabling my institution to do more: Islandora has enabled us to start implementing services and processes that were out of our reach using our previous repository platform. The best example I can provide is that we are now in the position to start a serious digital preservation program. We simply didn't have the means do that before we adopted Islandora.
  • Encouraging collaboration: Being a member of the Islandora community allows my institution to collaborate with a diverse set of partners, from individual staff working with counterparts at institutions that would otherwise be oceans apart (and expanding their skills while making new friends), to my Dean deciding to spend money from the Library's budget to fund our membership in the Islandora Foundation.
  • Being agile: The ability for people to make things happen with Islandora is pretty remarkable. I like Brad Spry's phrase "bringing ideas to life". It's true that not all institutions have the software development capacity required to respond to every new need, but there are lots of examples in our community of people with a variety of skills and backgrounds (site builders, developers, metadata librarians) coming together to solving a specific, shared problem in a surprisingly short amount of time. Being agile is closely related to encouraging collaboration, but the two ideas are distinct.
  • Free puppies are not really free: The care and feeding of free as-in-beer software of Islandora's scale (it's a frighteningly large puppy) and complexity (sometimes it can be a disobedient puppy) can be expensive, counted in staff time. But, in my experience, large proprietary systems tend not to excel at saving staff huge amounts of time. (On the other hand I can think of examples of proprietary tools that are real time savers.) Most software of any complexity and sophistication requires a lot of effort and expertise to use to its full potential. Islandora is no different.
I bet your panel will be great!

Mark
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Audrey Sage Lorberfeld

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Aug 25, 2017, 9:55:43 AM8/25/17
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Amanda, thank you so much! This is perfect.

Audrey Sage Lorberfeld

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Aug 25, 2017, 9:56:02 AM8/25/17
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Mark, 

Thank you! This is great information. And thank you for the luck, I hope we make everyone proud! :)

Alex Kent

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Aug 29, 2017, 4:30:13 PM8/29/17
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To, Islandora means a flexible, viable DAM solution that can meet a lot of different needs.  I currently do support, training, and marketing for Islandora.  I work for PALS in Mankato, MN, physically located in the Minnesota State University Library.  

Since about late 2012, early 2013 I have been working with Islandora, those first years devoted to learning how to use Islandora and getting to know the community.  Since then I've found the community highly supportive and invaluable.  I look forward every year to the Islandora Conference or Camps when I can meet up with everyone, and meet new people. 

PALS currently has 9 partners, 8 in Minnesota, 1 in Iowa. 

We work with:

The College of St. Scholastica (Duluth) - Private college
Minnesota State University-Mankato - 4 year state college
Bethany Lutheran College (Mankato) - Private college
Minnesota Water Research Digital Library (St. Paul, MN) - State Agency
Southwest Minnesota State University (Marshall, MN)
Leech Lake Tribal College
St. Cloud Technical and Community College 
Winona State University 
Luther College (Decorah, Iowa) - Private college

Minnesota-State University has the biggest repository at just over 97,000 items (includes page objects).  They have everything from photographs, newspapers, videos and photographs to oral histories.  See https://arch.lib.mnsu.edu/. An exciting recent development is Minnesota State University, Mankato is beginning work with their Athletics Department, to train their staff and students on ingesting objects.  The Athletics Department is quite excited about the possibilities of Islandora.   So Universities need to talk with their Athletics (and other) Departments to see who might be interested! 

 Southwest MN State University was one of our earlier partners, and they were quite strategic about choosing their first collection to digitize: Their alumni newsletter.  They thought it would appeal to their alumni foundation, and it did, and they have since formed a partnership with the Alumni Foundation and secured 5 years of total funding.  They have newspapers, news articles, University documents, and have started ingesting oral histories as well.  

Our other sites are all active as well ingesting various materials, and I will post more about them this week...I just wanted to get something up for you, Audrey.  
  
Hope it goes well! 

Essentially to me Islandora is a wonderful, flexible, viable DAM solution for varying institutions and can meet a wide range of unique needs.  The interface is extremely powerful and appealing, and the ingest forms really can make the metadata data entry easy.   

Audrey Sage Lorberfeld

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Aug 30, 2017, 10:22:51 AM8/30/17
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Thank you, Alex! 

Bryan Brown

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Aug 30, 2017, 3:03:04 PM8/30/17
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I've had this conversation with some colleagues recently, and I ended saying something along the lines of:

Islandora does for digital assets what Drupal does for content: it offers you an easy way to take care of 80% of your use cases right out of the box, while also giving you the tools to create custom solutions for the last 20% (the weird stuff). To me, both Islandora and Drupal are all about the possibilities they offer. With other systems you may be locked in to what it can and cannot do, but with both Drupal and Islandora nothing is off the table so long as you are willing to spend a bit of time/effort solving the problem.

Obviously this description is biased and has a lot of baked in Drupal-privilege, but we (FSU) are a Drupal shop all the way so this strongly informs our view of not only Islandora, but software development in general. We're hooked on hooks.

Audrey Sage Lorberfeld

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Aug 31, 2017, 9:37:03 AM8/31/17
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Thank you, Bryan! This is really great :)

Joanna DiPasquale

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Aug 31, 2017, 9:38:55 AM8/31/17
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Sent this directly to Audrey but realize that I want to share with everyone here!

For me, Islandora means so many things - community, collections, ease of use, open source, and more. I would have never been able to provide an open-source, scalable, and flexible repository solution to my institution (and its small-ish size) without the Islandora framework and software. The community itself is incredible, the software is easy to use but also great to leverage for more complicated matters, and resource sharing is amazing. I'm so glad that we found Islandora and am looking forward to where future developments take us.

Joanna DiPasquale
jjdipa...@gmail.com

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Brad Spry

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Aug 31, 2017, 3:54:06 PM8/31/17
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Islandora gives libraries a future; it is the bridge from traditional library collection management to digital collection management.


Yours,

Brad Spry
Atkins Library
UNC Charlotte





Audrey Sage Lorberfeld

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Sep 1, 2017, 10:15:02 AM9/1/17
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Thank you!!

Robin Naughton

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Sep 1, 2017, 2:58:48 PM9/1/17
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For me, Islandora is an opportunity to leverage a great repository and content management system while providing users with a good experience.  It is extensible and flexible enough that with a limited staff, we were able to accomplish a lot in a short period of time.  I like that it allows administrators and developers to shape it according to digital product needs. 

Best,
Robin Naughton
The New York Academy of Medicine Library

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