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Drupal as a Digital Asset Management System

Islandora and more!

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OUR TEAM

Danny Lamb

Technical Lead

Melissa Anez

Project and Community Manager

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Islandora Foundation

The Islandora Foundation is a community-driven soliciting non-profit, incorporated in Canada, with a mission to:

Steward the Islandora software platform and the community that develops and supports it.

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Store

SHARE

ORGANIZE

FIND

ANALYZE

PRESERVE

TRansform

CONTROL

What is a DAMS?

A DAMS is what you need if you want to store a large number of digital files, and then *be able to find them and do things with them.* It’s not enough to just dump your content into digital storage and leave it be.

Storage is a key element, but for those files to be useful, that storage needs to be:

Organize: if you have ever tried to sort through the files in your Drupal file system to find something that wasn’t named clearly, you can probably appreciate why it can be useful to go beyond a single lump of files in storage. Putting things into collections can get you a long way.

Share: You need a way to access and share the files, which can include having a way to view them in place, even for file types that Drupal doesn’t have a native viewer for;

Control: You may want to share the files, but you may also want to limit who can access them, and/or track who is accessing them.

Find: The files need to be searchable and discoverable

Analyse: You may need to analyze your content to pull information from what you’re storing. How many files are yo keeping of x type? How much disk space is one collection taking?

Transform: Or Enhance. You may need to transform your files into a more useable format; something smaller and easier to store, or share.

Preserve: You may need to take additional steps to preserve your file in formats and with tools that help to ensure the integrity of your data over the long term and protect it from digital decay and from becoming less accessible through drifting formats and standards. Technology can change quickly; you don’t want to store a file, oly to discover a few years down the road that you don’t have any programs that can open it anymore. You may also not want the Drupal file system to be the only place you’re storing things. By having additional storage for the important parts you have a back up if something goes sideways.

Enhance/Transform - you may want to take your files and make version of them that are better for your needs; TIFF is a great lossway format for keeping large images and all of their glorious detail, but very few browsers can handle it and even if they can, you probably want a smaller file size if you’re going to serve it on the web.

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File

Metadata

Viewer?

Preservation?

Web Version?

Digital Assets

If what you’re storing is a “file,” then a DAMS adds other aspects to that file to make it useful. You need metadata, or information about the digital file, for it to be useful and discoverable. Using a video as an example, this can be as simple as file format, size, and date, or as complex as knowing who took a video, who edited it, what buildings and people are pictured, and what the usage rights are associated with the file. You may want to have a viewer built into your system so that you can view it without downloading. If you’re sharing that same video on your website, you may want to have a version of it that’s lower quality and doesn’t use so much bandwidth. If you want to preserve the video, you may want to create a version that adheres to certain archival standards and to create a “checksum” so that you can automatically check for digital decay. These are all aspects of what a DAMS can bring to the table.

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The Idea

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Islandora 5

Drupal 5

Drupal 6

Islandora 6

Drupal 7

Islandora 7

Drupal Versions = Islandora Versions

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Adoption Spreads

There are currently more than 320 sites using islandora

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Free as in “Free Kitten”

Not “Free Sandwich”

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Islandora is used by...

Colleges & Universities
Research institutes
Public Libraries
Museums
Archives
Government agencies
Ad Agencies
Religious institutions

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Islandora 7 was a burger

In the Islandora community, we often use food infographics to describe things. And so the version of Islandora that got heavily adopted we lovingly refer to as a cheeseburger. Islandora 7 is best explained as a vertically integrated stack, with Fedora as the bottom bun, Drupal as the top bun, and Islandora as a patty in the middle. The toppings are the various custom modules, viewers, and other utilities that allow users to customize Islandora to their use case. Almost all of these toppings are Drupal modules, and most of them are, without exception, custom, “Islandora” versions of common Drupal contrib modules. We’ve got over 48 of them in our official release, and dozens more developed by Islandora sites for their own use cases. The reason it was like this is because of how we treated Fedora. The preservation layer wasn’t being used as a preservation layer, it was being used as a database. So we couldn’t use nodes, comments, entities, etc… And so we were locked out of what Drupal was really best at.

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Islandora

+

Drupal

8

For real this time.

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Islandora is a bento box

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Microservices for Drupal

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Extract, Transform, Load

"film effect" by MattX27 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

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Connecting Drupal To

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Drupal DAMS

Drupal tools that work really well in a DAMS

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Use case: I want to store a nearly infinite amount of files in Drupal

Solution:

Flysystem

Expand public/private filesystems with local disks or cloud providers
Works with

Spare hard drives
Amazon S3
Rackspace Cloud Files
Openstack Swift
Fedora!

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Use case: I want a complex workflow where people play different roles

Solution:

Content moderation

Expand past published/unpublished
revisionable content entities move between moderation states

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Use case: I want to track views/downloads from my site

Solution:

matomo

Embeds JS in the HTML to communicate with a Matomo server

matomo_reports

View your statistics in Drupal

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Use case: I want to upload files with non-Latin characters in their names

Alphabet αℓρнαвεт คlקђค๒єt

Solution:

transliterate_filenames

Converts all uploaded filenames to Latin characters
Handles spaces, braces, brackets, commas, and all kinds of other funky characters that cause problems, too

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Use case: I want to edit the same piece of metadata across multiple records

Solution:

Views Bulk Edit

Create a View with the relevant fields, use “Modify field values” as action

Add exposed filters and Better Exposed Filters for extra ease of use.

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Use case: I want to fill out same field in multiple records

Solution:

Views Entity Form Field

Once again, add exposed filters and Better Exposed Filters for extra ease of use.

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Islandora Contrib

Tools developed in the Islandora community, for any Drupal site

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Use case: I want sweet looking zoomable images

Solution:

Openseadragon

Provides a field formatter and block for working with IIIF image servers

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

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Use case: I want to auto-complete my linked data

Solution:

Linked Data Lookup Field

Out of the box support for:

Library of Congress Subject Headings
Global Research Identifier Database (GRID) entries
Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification Fields of Research
More!

Add Autocomplete Endpoint to pull from other Drupals

Linked Data is a way of doing structured data so that it’s useful for semantic queries. It relies on shared standards to connect information is ways that are machine and human readable. If you;ve heard of the term “The Semantic Web,” that’s what we’re supporting here.

For example, if I have a picture of a cat on my site, and I want to apply “cat” as a subject using taxonomies, instead of just having my own local “cat” term living on my site, I can point out to an authoritative record for the concept of “cat,” (such as a Library of Congress subject heading, for example), which makes that subject term understandable by anything or anyone who can parse the authoritative entry for “cat.”

Linked data is something Islandora, Drupal, and Fedora already handle. This module makes it just a little bit easier by giving you an auto-complete for those authoritative sources, so you can add new terms on the fly. It comes with support for those listed, and it’s easy to add more.

Autocomplete Endpoint is a brand-new module that expands this even more, and lets a Drupal site act as one of those authoritative sources, so you could auto-complete from the vocabularies on another Islandora site.

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Use case: I want nice charts showing what’s in my collection

Solution:

Islandora Repository Reports

Colorful charts showing:

Files by type
Disk usage
Nodes by created date, collection, type
More!

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Use case: I want my repository to be harvestable

Solution:

REST OAI-PMH

(Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting)
Exposes entities as Dublin Core in an OAI-PMH endpoint

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Use case: I want to leave information for deleted objects, not just a 404

Solution:

Tombstones

Replaces 404 with info about what was removed, when, and why.

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Use case: I want to perform fixity checking so I know my data hasn’t changed

Solution:

Islandora Riprap

Node-level and repository-level fixity reports
Fixity auditing field on Media

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Other Tools

Containers are published on Dockerhub with example orchestrations

Manage files and metadata from your own desktop!

Command line tools to manage files and metadata

Dev Ops

Islandora Workbench Desktop

Islandora Workbench

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Islandora in Use

Examples

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Latin American Digital Initiatives

Pictures, posters, newspapers, pamphlets, & more
Post-custodialism
Spanish/English/Portuguese

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Canterbury Stories

Culture and history of Christchurch City Libraries
NZ web accessibility standards
Māori/English

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Open Access Kent State (OAKS)

Journals and scholarly publications
Institutional Repository
Open Journal Systems Integration
OAI-PMH for Drupal

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Research Data Management at UPEI

ORCID & DataCite integration
Data management planning tools
DOI minting
Data privacy and security (GDPR)
Google-readiness

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Archives Central

Community archives
200,000 records migrated from Kete
Records in Contexts ontology

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What’s in Islandora

Support for any digital file type
Batch ingest and migrations
Faceted searching
Flexible metadata
Flexible storage
IIIF support
JSON-LD serialization
Linked Data
Multilingual Content and Interface
OAI-PMH
Usage Statistics
Docker deployment

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What’s on the horizon...

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THANKS!

Do you have any questions?

manez@islandora.ca

dlamb@islandora.ca

https://islandora.ca

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CREDITS: This presentation template was created by Slidesgo, including icons by Flaticon, and infographics & images by Freepik