SFU Library launches new Islandora 2 Digital Collections website

[Janice Banser]

Hi everybody,

Here at Simon Fraser University Library, we are excited to let you know we have recently soft-launched our new Digital Collections website. We have migrated about 30% of our content so far and are still making small adjustments and improvements to the site.  We would be more than happy to hear your feedback.  

A few notes about the new site.  

• We use two content types, one for Collections and one for all other Repository items
• We have developed a custom metadata field that allows us to accommodate non-standard metadata that does not fit our Core Metadata template. 
  • See for example: "Venue" and "Arrangement note" in the item Crowd at Budstock '81
• Controlled terms in some of the taxonomies/vocabularies. New additions have to be approved by the team.  
  • For example: Subject, Language, and Copyright.  
• We have publications/serials and publications/serials with articles. 
• Custom compound object navigation 
• Redirects from Islandora Legacy URLs for all items except pages
• Gitlab-based workflow for deploying to dev, staging, and production environments and to developer laptops. 
• New Islandora Workbench features were introduced during, and inspired by, our migration, such as "recovery mode" and "checking if a node already exists".
• Search within a Collection
• And thanks to Jonathan Hunt at Catalyst, you can expand a search to include full-text results. 

We would be happy to do a demo or presentation sometime if the community is interested.  

Many thanks to our SFU team Mark Jordan, Mark Christensen, Rob Bos, Todd Holbrook, and Ian Song, and to Jonathan and Chris at Catalyst.  

Janice Banser (Project lead)

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Janice Banser

Digital & Web Services Librarian

Simon Fraser University Library

jba...@sfu.ca  |778.782.7665

I respectfully acknowledge the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), q̓íc̓əy̓ (Katzie), and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) Nations and peoples on whose ancestral and unceded lands the three SFU campuses are located.