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.