It's time to take a look at another awesome outcome from our Islandoracon Use-a-Thon: Waveform thumbnails for audio files, a handy addition to audio support in Islandora 8 that has the distinction of having become a standard part of the stack since the Use-a-Thon.

The idea came about from a collaboration between Renee Chalut from Vancouver Public Library and Jonathan Hunt from Catalyst. Renee shared a VPL collection of audio files that looks a little uniform, as the thumbnails were all the same:

FFmpeg to the rescue! FFmpeg is quite capable of using the waveform of an audio file to generate an image. With a few tweaks to Homarus to allow PNG thumbnails and generate the png, Islandora 8 can present distinct thumbnails for audio that actually reflect the content of the resource node:

This is such a simple, but useful tweak that this pull request has made it standard in Islandora 8. Work continues to expand this tool to generate animated gifs as thumbnails (an improvement that could have application for video as well).

We're gearing up for our second release of Islandora 8, and that means we need to document and test all of the awesome new features we've collected in the past few months. We're starting with a documentation sprint from November 11th to 22nd, focusing on improving what we've already got and adding information on

• Breadcrumbs
• OAI-PMH
• IIIF Manifests
• Paged Content
• Multi-Paged Openseadragon
• Text Extraction
• Plus anything else you think is missing!

You can sign up for the sprint here. And all you need to participate is a free Github account so you can edit our markdown files. Even if you don't have any experience with Github or Islandora 8, we're implementing a buddy system to show you the ropes. Every page of documentation will have someone on hand to explain the features we're documenting and help you navigate Github. So this can be a great way to learn while making meaningful contributions to the Islandora project.

Also the committment level is as much or as little as you can give. Just claim a page from our todo list and pick away at what you have time to handle. If you don't want to document but have some in-depth knowledge of the stack or some Github/markdown skills, please consider signing up to be a buddy. Each page needs one, and it's another way you can make a small but important contribution to the process. We're also open to suggestions and improvements, so if you know of a gap in our documentation, feel free to add pages to the list. We'll try to knock out as much as we can in two weeks to make Islandora 8 even better!

As we noted in last week's Look Back at Islandoracon, our Islandora 8 Use-a-Thon was a huge success and participants solved some pretty significant use cases using nothing but Drupal modules and configuration. This week I'd like to showcase one of the entries that didn't, but that presents a well-researched, very well demo-'d start list of options for creating exhibits in Islandora 8. Presented by The Exhibitionists (Mark Jordan, David Keiser-Clark, Don Richards, Lucas van Schaik, Alan Stanley, Charlie Tillay), we have Islandora 8 Exhibitions and TimeLineJS.

In the main thrust of the use case, the group lays out how to deploy a sleek, interactive timeline tool that can present your resource nodes. It's user friendly both to the manager who populates it, and the end users who use it to browse your exhibit, and it's already perfectly deployable in Islandora 8 (as we saw in a live demo!). They also explored some other ways to build exhibit-type views of resource nodes in islandora; it's well worth checking out the full recipe. TimeLineJS in action:

Stay tuned for more from the Islandoracon Use-a-Thon in coming weeks! We have eight amazing entries, every one of which produced valuable recommendations for anyone deploying Islandora.

Last week, the Islandora community came together for its third major conference, dubbed Islandoracon and held in Vancouver, BC. Our hosts at Vancouver Public Library and Simon Fraser University put us up in some fantastic locations (see below!), but the real highlights of the week came from what our attendees brought with them to the workshops, general sessions, and Use-a-Thon

Workshops

The conference opened with four half-day workshops, with "Islandora 101" style introductions to Islandora 7 and Islandora 8, an overview of Islandora ISLE, and training in how to build your own plugins (PDF). We closed out the main conference with more workshops, running two tracks of 90-minute deep-dives into different use cases and tools, such as Working with Linked Data and Ontologies, Islandora as an IR, and Preservation in Islandora 8.

Sessions

The main conference opened with updates about the Islandora Foundation, the Islandora community, and the exciting new world of Islandora 8 and its much closer connections to Drupal, before opening up the floor to a wide variety of sessions submitted by members of the Islandora community. We have been gathering up slides and linking to them in the conference schedule wherever we can.

Use-a-Thon

Our first-ever Islandora Use-a-Thon was designed to explore what we can achieve by leaning into Drupal and solving common use cases with contributed modules and configuration. Our community rose to the challenge beyond our wildest expectations, and we'll be spending the next few weeks unpacking the results for you. Every one of the eight entries produced something of real and immediate value for Islandora, giving our judges (Alex Kent, Danny Lamb, Rosie Le Faive, and Bethany Seeger) a real challenge to pick these top three winners:

Third Place: Archives & Archives-Adjacent

Goal: gathering specific use-cases to support archival materials in Islandora 8

Results!

Second Place: The Islandora 8 Collectioneers

Goal: "Search within this collection". Stretch goal: "Search underneath this collection, including subcollections"

Results!

First Place: What’s in a Name(space)?

Goal: Defining a path forward for multi-tenancy implementations in Islandora 8

Results!

Overall, it was a pretty incredible week and a real celebration of our community and all that we can acheive together. Next year we'll go back to holding smaller Islandora Camps around the world, but stay tuned for Islandoracon to return on 2021!

I would like to thank everyone involved for yet another successful community sprint. Our goal was to implement paged content, the #1 requested feature from our recent community survey. This included

• Generating IIIF manifests for paged content
• Adapting our openseadragon module to read IIIF manifests
• Adding a 'weight' field to our default content type, Repository Item.
• A draggable UI for re-ordering pages
• Extracting text from pages using OCR

After two weeks of intense sprinting, with two more for testing and merging in the code, I am pleased to announce that we have implemented each and every one of these features. The community has provided a fully functional paged content solution, replete with automated tests! This is an incredible achievement for us, further showcasing that large features and high quality code can be provided by our small but focused group of community contributors.

Speaking of whom, the next time you use paged content in Islandora 8, you have the following fine community members to thank:

• Seth Shaw - University of Nevada at Las Vegas
• William Matheson - Prince Rupert Library
• Nat Kanthan - University of Toronto Scarborough
• Eli Zoller - Arizona State University
• Minnie Rangel - University of Texas at Austin
• Jared Whiklo - University of Manitoba
• Danny Bernstein - Lyrasis
• Jonathan Hunt - Catalyst
• Joe Corall - Kent State University

In particular, the Islandora Foundation would like to thank first time sprint contributors Minnie Rangel, Danny Bernstein, and Joe Corall for their pull requests. We'd also like to recognize Alan Stanley from UPEI, who developed text extraction for both images and PDFs prior to the sprint for UPEI's CANARIE funded Research Data Management project.

For those who would like to see the feature first-hand, we'll be distributing VMs containing it (as well as other improvements) at Islandoracon. We'll also be updating our sandbox at future.islandora.ca as well. It all depends on one final installation pull request, which once merged, will also make the code available from our dev branch for those inclined to run the installer themselves.

The University of Prince Edward Island, birthplace of Islandora, is working on a CANARIE funded project to create a Research Data Management (RDM) platform that utilizes and extends Islandora 8.

Still a work-in-progress, the project team will share and demonstrate aspects of the current iteration of the RDM platform including:

Islandoracon is coming up in a little over a month! We have some information to share with attendees in advance of the conference to help you prepare:

Schedule

Locations

• Monday, October 7th: Half-Day Workshops at VPL
• Tuesday, October 8th: Main Conference Sessions at Harbour Centre
• Wednesday, October 9th: Main Conference Sessions at Harbour Centre
• Thursday, October 10th: Main Conference Workshops at Harbour Centre
• Friday, October 11th: Islandora 8 Use-a-Thon (Hackfest) at VPL

Getting Around

Checking in at the Conference

Conference Catering

Social Events

Use-a-Thon Social (October 7)

Trivia Night (October 8)

Bill Reid Gallery (October 9)

If you wish to bring a guest, extra tickets can be purchased from our Square store: https://islandora-foundation.square.site/

Workshops

Half-Day Workshops (October 7)

90-Minutes Workshops (October 10)

Preservation Capabilities of Islandora 8

People who are attending the "Preservation Capabilities of Islandora 8" workshop on Thursday afternoon will get more out of the hands-on portion of the workshop if they can arrive with Islandora Bagger installed on their laptop (installing Islandora is not required, just Islandora Bagger as described in its README file). However, having Islandora Bagger installed is not essential; the instructor will try to accommodate participants who don't have it. Also, if your institution has developed or is developing a digital preservation policy or action plans, please come prepared to discuss them during the workshop.

Introduction to Fedora 5.0

1. Download and install VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
2. Download and install Vagrant: http://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html
3. Download and unzip the 5.1.0 release of the Fedora VM: https://github.com/fcrepo4-exts/fcrepo4-vagrant/archive/fcrepo4-vagrant-5.1.0.zip
4. Using a Command Line Interface, navigate to the VM directory from step 3 and run the command: vagrant up
   1. Note that this step will take a while as the VM downloads and installs a full virtual environment
5. Test the VM by opening your web browser and navigating to: http://localhost:8080/fcrepo
   1. The administrator username/password is fedoraAdmin/secret3
6. Turn off the VM by running the command: vagrant halt

Originally posted by Release Manager Jared Whiklo:

Hi all,

7.x-1.13 is complete.

This was my first time as a release manager and it was a smooth and easy process thanks (I'm confident) to the work of all the previous release managers, so a thank you to all of them.

Thank you to all the Auditors, Documentors, Testers and Component Managers. Without all of you Islandora would not be made.

A big thank you to Janice Banser (Auditing Manager), Caroyln Moritz (Testing Manager) and Don Richards (Documentation Manager). Your continuing hard work and support of the release process makes the release manager job much more enjoyable.

The Islandora 7.x-1.13 release contains 4 new features, 22 improvements, and 18 bug fixes.

You can find a full list of the above tickets on the Release Notes.

The Release Notes also contains links to the release branches/tags for all the associated Islandora repositories.

Please remember to avoid mixing versions of Islandora modules to ensure compatibility.

Finally, make sure to thank/buy a coffee for/hug your local release helper. Without all of them, the job of Release Manager suddenly becomes completely irrelevant.

• Adam Vessey
• Andrija Sagic
• Bayard Miller
• Ben Companjen
• Brandon Weigel
• Brian Harrington
• Bryan Brown
• Caleb Derven
• Carolyn Moritz
• Danny Lamb
• Derek Merleaux
• Devin Soper
• Diego Pino
• Don Richards
• Donnie Hardin
• Gavin Morris
• Janice Banser
• Johanna Vessey
• Jonathan Green
• Jordan Dukart
• Keila Zayas Ruiz
• Mark Jordan
• Martha Tenney
• Matthew Miguez
• Melissa Anez
• Nat Kanthan
• Nelson Hart
• Noah Smith
• Pat Dunlavey
• Paul Cummins
• Paul Trilsbeek
• Sarah Lippincott
• Scott Ziegler
• Shayne Walker
• William Panting

See you at IslandoraCon 2019 Vancouver!

cheers,
jared

We've had some good conversations on the regular Islandora 8 Tech Call about how to best handle multi-tenancy/multi-sites in Islandora 8, but there are multiple ways to come at this, and we'd really like to hear from as many people with this use case as possible before settling on a default approach to support. To that end, we're holding an open meeting and inviting anyone interested. If you use multisites in 7, need multisites in 8, or just have some knowledge of the topic and want to help us shape our solution, please join us to discuss.

The discussion will be held on Zoom on Wednesday, August 14th at 12PM Eastern (right before the regular Tech Call).

Agenda (with zoom link) here.