Opening up with Islandora

Presenters: Linda Richter, Innovation Coordinator PALS, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities; Anne Stenzel, Archives Technician, and Daardi Sizemore, Archivist/Special Collections Librarian, Minnesota State University, Mankato; Pam Sukalski, Librarian, Southwest Minnesota State University Islandora is an open source software for institutional repositories. Islandora makes it possible to create and edit metadata and to discover, view, and manage repository assets. PALS selected Islandora as its institutional repository option in 2012 and began beta testing with Southwest State University in 2013. Anne Stenzel, MSU Mankato, and Pam Sukalski, Southwest State University, spoke about their experiences creating their institutional repositories with Islandora, and Linda Richter spoke about features of Islandora and working with libraries to set up access. Pam Sukalski spoke about her experience creating an institutional repository for Southwest State University, http://archives.smsu.edu/. She took the lead on the project, working with PALS staff and SWSU IT and marketing staff. She said the PALS staff were of tremendous help throughout the process. They have digitized 3 of their 4 student newspapers dating back to 1968 with the fourth coming. They have also digitized their alumni publication, Focus, from 1980 to the present. The site offers a “search within” feature, name search, date, search whole collection, or just a specific issue. They are working on adding an “Honor Roll” in appreciation of the donors that helped make the site and digitization efforts possible. She also mentioned that the technicians found the workflow with Islandora much easier to understand and use than ContentDM. Daardi and Anne spoke about MSU Mankato’s initiative to invest in an institutional repository and the creation of ARCH, University Archive’s digital collections, http://arch.lib.mnsu.edu/, which houses their photographs, student magazines, student newspapers, and oral histories. Their work began in 2006 using the ContentDM format. In 2014 they migrated to PALS’ Islandora. The reasons for migrating to Islandora were ease of format, relationship with PALS, and the support PALS offered. With Islandora they are looking to improve their social media connectivity and use Google Analytics as well as expand their access to archival collections. With Islandora, anyone can share or tweet what they find in the collections. No login is required. It works easily with Facebook and their library’s Facebook page to which they can post directly from Islandora. They also appreciate the easy search mechanism in Islandora and the flexible metadata options for records. They noted that their metadata is more detailed than Southwest State University’s but both work well for search and retrieval. MSU Mankato Archives' next steps are to create bookmarks and “My Favorites” tagging options within ARCH and add new collections such as yearbooks, more oral histories, and manuscript collections so that ARCH serves as a platform for highlighting the University. Linda Richter talked about what Islandora can do and the advantages of having an open source platform. It is very customizable – you can decide how much metadata you want to store with each item, and it features Google Analytics integration, social media connections, bookmarking, GIS integration, and image annotation. More information about PALS service for Islandora and links to all MnSCU repositories can be found via http://islandora.mnpals.net/.