While I would really prefer to cat-blog my merry way into the holiday weekend, I feel duty-bound to follow up on my previous posts about the digital collections migration project that has dominated our 2016.
Since I last wrote, we have launched two more new collections in the Fedora/Hydra platform that comprises the Duke Digital Repository. The larger of the two, and a major accomplishment for our digital collections program, was the Duke Chapel Recordings. We also completed the Alex Harris Photographs.
Meanwhile, we are working closely with our colleagues in Digital Repository Services to facilitate a whole other migration, from Fedora 3 to 4, and onto a new storage platform. It’s the great wheel in which our own wheel is only the wheel inside the wheel. Like the wheel in the sky, it keeps on turning. We don’t know where we’ll be tomorrow, though we expect the platform migration to be completed inside of a month.
Last time, I wrote hopefully of the needle moving on the migration of digital collections into the new platform, and while behind the scenes the needle is spasming toward the FULL side of the gauge, for the public it still looks stuck just a hair above EMPTY. We have two batches of ten previously published collections ready to re-launch when we roll over to Fedora 4, which we hope will be in June – one is a group of photography collections, and the other a group of manuscripts-based collections.
In the meantime, the work on migrating the digital collections and building a new UI for discovery and access absorbs our team. Much of what we’ve learned and accomplished during this project has related to the migration, and quite a bit has appeared in this blog.
Our Metadata Architect, Maggie Dickson, has undertaken wholesale remediation of twenty years’ worth of digital collections metadata. Dealing with date representation alone has been a critical effort, as evidenced by the series of posts by her and developer Cory Lown on their work with EDTF.
Sean Aery has posted about his work as a developer, including the integration of the OpenSeadragon image viewer into our UI. He also wrote about “View Item in Context,” four words in a hyperlink that represent many hours of analysis, collaboration, and experimentation within our team.
I expect, by the time the wheel has completed another rotation, and it’s my turn again to write for the blog, there will be more to report. Batches will have been launched, features deployed, and metadata remediated. Even more cat pictures will have been posted to the Internet. It’s all one big cycle and the migration is part of it.