Issues with upgrading a large site to Islandora 8

[Jakov Marin Vežić]

Dear Islandora team and community,

we have a running multisite repository system named DABAR based on Islandora 7 upon which we built a lot of our modules and additional logic to handle specific needs of institutions in Croatia. I will list the technical outline and some of the features we have, either core Islandora functionality or our own custom features and modules: 

• Islandora 7 (latest) with Drupal multisite
  • Drupal 7
  • Fedora 3
  • Solr 4
• 150 institutions / repositories - each institution has a repository which is a single Drupal site (and domain/vhost) under multisite configuration
• Each institution has their own namespace
• All institutions share the same Fedora and Solr instance
• Some basic stats as of writing this:
  • A total of over 158,000 stored objects
    • Each with their own binary, MODS, RELS-EXT, etc. datastreams in Fedora
  • 16 different content types, each with their own MODS specifications: https://dabar.srce.hr/en/browse/cmodel all defined by relevant working groups (https://dabar.srce.hr/en/objects)
• Federated or “group” repositories/sites:
  • A central search with all repositories/namespaces and content types included: https://dabar.srce.hr/en  (Search the content of all DABAR repositories)
  • Special repositories/sites that display only certain types of materials, for example https://zir.nsk.hr/en which displays all thesis from all institutional repositories (done via namespaces, content types, and Solr settings)
  • Special repositories which display objects from multiple other repositories, for example:
    • University of Zagreb repository: https://repozitorij.unizg.hr/en displays objects from repositories of Faculties belonging to the University, such as
      • Faculty of Science: https://repozitorij.pmf.unizg.hr/en (Namespace: pmf)
      • Faculty of Law: https://repozitorij.pravo.unizg.hr/en (Namespace: pravo)
      • School of Medicine: https://repozitorij.mef.unizg.hr/en (Namespace: mef)
      • etc
    • This is all done via namespaces, so the group University of Zagreb repository displays objects with namespaces pmf, pravo, mef, etc.
• Custom XML forms for managing each content type (through MODS)
• Custom Drupal modules to view and manage the custom content types (mostly via Tuque)
• Some custom access rights, for example “institutional access” via domain and “authenticated users access” via AAI (national education system simple-saml SSO), both of which are saved in MODS
• Ability to change content type for some types of publications (via MODS, XSLT and RELS-EXT)
• Ability to define object status, such as “Active”, “Unfinished” or “Unpublished” via a custom datastream in Fedora
• “My objects” – listing all objects that a certain user archived
• Virtual collections (an object that has its own metadata and contains other objects), for example: https://repozitorij.mef.unizg.hr/en/islandora/object/mef%3A3254
• Relationships are defined through MODS and RELS-EXT
• Bookmarks, slightly modified based on Islandora bookmarks module

 So based on all this, and the changes that Islandora 8 brought to the table, we are looking for any feedback and tips, either from the community (maybe someone in a similar situationa) or the technical team of Islandora on how we could make all this work with Islandora 8.

Mainly, we don’t know how to handle aforementioned features of our current Islandora installation in Islandora 8, and we are are mostly concerned about:

• MODS (for long-term preservation and interoperability)

• Multisite Drupal (each repository/namespace on its own site)

• Group/federated repositories (described above)

• Namespaces (with PIDs)

These are required to stay in the future on our platform, and we appreciate any input on how to make them work in Islandora 8.

Regards,

Jakov M. Vežić
Middleware and Data Services
University of Zagreb, University Computing Centre (Srce), www.srce.unizg.hr/en
https://dabar.srce.hr/en/dabar

[Brandon Weigel]

There is a document being worked on to track feature parity between Islandora 7 and 8, which might help with some of your questions: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jE19AZgwceTo9-eccCRfseiO-4q4iVGPsMWxC5JZrL4/edit#gid=960987100

[Jakov Marin Vežić]

We took a look at the document but there's still a lot of unknowns regarding some features of Islandora 7. For example, namespaces aren't a thing anymore if we understand correctly? So there's no way to create group repositories that gather objects from multiple namespaces? And in a single Fedora instance there's no way to tell to which namespace an object belongs to?

Also how does the complex metadata work now? Say we want to have multiple authors in the item and seperate fields for name, surname, ORCID, affiliation, etc. How would all those seperate metadata be connected to that author, since there's no more XML?