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#access2009pei – Mark Leggott – Virtual Research Environment, 2 Years Later
3 Oct 09
Islandora Takes Shape
Islandora is the combination of “Island” and “Dora the Explorer”.
Anticipating the death and rebirth of the repository. Drupal/Fedora combination: default alterior motive to build capacity in the Library/Campus, keep the library at the forefront of all campus activities: teaching/learning, research, admin. Data stewardship a critical concept. Must store, transform, provide access, mutate, migrate data. Longevity and usefulness.
Stewardship is a must, curation is just one small part. It is a deluge, researchers are freaking that they have to manage this stuff. Recent reaction from scientists at conference: This is the first time someone has responded to the data challenges I am facing. Typical, IT draws the line at hardware. There is no more significant opportunity for academic libraries in the next few decades. Will also stimulate library’s research development, IR development, etc.
Two years later: vision is the same, have some experience, a good evolution of tools in the community, and the library is the foundation for data management in all three landscapes. Research is the core driver, but admin is a significant driver as well. Staff feels enabled in finding solutions to challenges.
It’s all about the local: Google can’t do local like we can. Every research project is multidisciplinary and multinational, so your local becomes global and international.
Focus is on OS and open data. Have about 7 staff 50% or more committed to the project, soon to be 12+. Research, have received about $150K in hardware, faculty are encouraged to leverage research grants to by hardware add-ons to increase capacity rather than get standalone servers. Also about $200K recent funding for staff. Research fund tech staff grants rerouted to the library. Leveraging multiple pools of resources to build shared capacity both in hardware and staffing. Interest in using Islandora increasing at Admin level, e.g. Senate document management pilot: immediate storage and stewardship for institutional documents. Rather than throw money at adopting a document management system from scratch, are investing in building document management capabilities into Islandora.
The learning environment is the least active, e.g. learning object repositories haven’t really taken off, but focus is on plugging Islandora into learning management system. Currently over 50 research VREs from a broad range of disciplines, a number of others dedicated to admin areas. Probably looking at giving each major committee its own VRE. The look is pretty basic, starting to look more at improving; focus has been content.
Islandora external: 1st external contract by end of Sept. Implementors include U of North Texas, Georgia Inst of Tech, UNB, Carleton, UGuelph; like all OS projects, there may be more. Sloan-Kettering is interested. Working on DuraSpace partnership. Also working of FESL.
All data is stored in Fedora rather than Drupal: data, metadata, workflow, authentication all stored and maintained in the repository. Drupal is the collaborative layer. Three or four Drupal multi-site installations. Keep public installations separate from higher
Islandora is not in the Drupal contrib because some clean up is needed. It’s the glue that ties Fedora and Drupal together: D module, php and java apps, rule engine for flexible workflows, drop-in support for modules. Use a senior level comp sci class for development of components (e.g. of TEI editor shown earlier). Plug-in capability.
Ability to define and integrate complex digital workflows. A lot of science is drudge work, similar to the drudgery in digitizing books. Looking at integrating Taverna.
Solution packs: policies, disseminators, worklows, apps, data. First solution pack will be IRs.
Sun partnership: rapidly evolving to provide support to Sun resellers for selling hardware platform with Islandora pre-installed. Goal is to provide development and support contracts to the community generally.
Goal is to have a rich, fully defined community framework. There is effort that goes into customizing data management for different research groups. There will be a quarterly roadmap for code changes, each will have a new solution pack starting with IRs in January 2010. Planning Islandora/RIRI institute for Summer 2010.
Posted by pzed on October 3, 2009 at 7.18am
Categories: access 2009, conferences, libraries, twitter
