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.

Islandorans!

Fresh off the heels of our survey for what features to implement next, we're following through on the number one requested feature: paged content. For those who aren't familiar with the terminology, paged content is how we describe books/newspapers/journals/etc... where each page has been scanned individually as a high resolution image. In order to state that we fully support paged content, there's a handful of things Islandora 8 needs to be capable of doing:

• Order pages trhough the UI
• Render pages in a compatible viewer (IABV or Openseadragon)
• Extract text from scanned pages so they are discoverable

A couple of organizations (UT Austin, UNLV) have already made some progress on these fronts, but in order to take that work over the finish line, we need your help! We're holding a two week sprint from September 3rd - 13th to put our heads together and get this done. So if you or your organization have an interest in using paged content in Islandora (that's at least 66 of you from the survey results!), then please put your name down on our sign up sheet. You don't neccessarily have to be a programmer to pitch in, either. There's plenty of configuration/documentation/testing that you can contribute. And if you haven't done so already, please fill out a contributor license agreement when signing up.

We followed the initial 1.0.0 release of Islandora 8 in June with an hour-long webinar that provided an overview of what was in the release, some quick demos, and a Q&A period for questions from the Islandora community. It went amazingly well and we got some excellent feedback from attendees, so we're going to try to make this a regular event for Islandora.

For our second webinar, we will dedicate an hour to what's next for Islandora 8, based on feedback from our development priorities survey. Join us to learn about features, improvements, release dates, and more. Just like the first webinar, we'll set aside a generous question period and record for those who can't make it.

The webinar will be on August 13 at 10 AM Eastern Time. Register now.

We asked for your input on features for the next release, and we got an impressive number of responses. A total of 76 individuals and organizations responded to our poll, which is a new record for us! It's the best view into the actual needs of our community members we've ever gotten, and we're excited to share the results with you. This spreadsheet has some charts for each of the three questions on the survey, and the raw data is tucked away in some shrunken columns to the left if you're curious.

As a summary, here are the top 10 results for each question, with the number of votes received in parentheses after each feature. Keep in mind that participants were allowed to vote for more than one feature, and there's a different number of responses for each question. There's a couple of ties in there too, so don't let the visual order of things sway you when there's the same number of votes for multiple features.

What features do you need before you could move to Islandora 8?

76 Responses

• Paged Content (66)
• Access Restrictions and Embargoes (44)
• OAI-PMH Endpoint (36)
• OCR Derivatives (33)
• Web Accessibility (30)
• Search and Discovery Improvements (20)
• IR Support (17)
• MODS Metadata Display (17)
• Versioning (15)
• Dockerization (13)

What features are "nice to have" but not critical?

65 Responses

• Citation Generation (28)
• Versioning (24)
• SEO (24)
• RDF Mapping UI (22)
• FITS Derivaties (20)
• MODS Metadata Display (20)
• Oxford Common Filesystem Layout (20)
• Search and Discovery Improvements (16)
• Web Accessibility (14)
• Dockerization (14)

What features are not necessary for your organization?

42 Responses

• Integration with Alternate Fedora Implementations (25)
• Fedora Multi-Tenancy (Multisites) (17)
• RDF Mapping UI (11)
• Oxford Common Filesystem Layout (10)
• Dockerization (10)
• MODS Metadata Display (7)
• IR Support (6)
• Citation Generation (5)
• SEO (4)
• OAI-PMH (2)

When interpreting the results, we're putting more emphasis on the features folks feel they must have before adopting Islandora 8. The features people responding as being "not necessary" or "nice to have" balance the picture a little bit, but we're not giving a ton of negative weight to them. We view them more of a reminder that, simply put, not everyone wants every feature.

Awesomely, many of the "must have" features already have a solution in the works at some stage of development within the community. This really adds gravity to their placement in the top ten, and speaks to our incredible developer community who are already ahead of the curve! And for the rest of the "must have" features, we've already identified our starting points using core or contributed modules from Drupal.org. It's possible to do a lot in Islandora 8 by enabling modules and exporting configuration, and we're confident we can help guide community activity towards getting these features in with the least amount of code possible. Here's the current lay of the land on all these "must have" features.

Paged Content

Paged content was the clear winner of the survey, with a whopping 66 out of 76 favorable responses. When initially developing Islandora 8, we purposefully chose to focus on "single" objects first and tackle books/newspapers/serials/compounds later. It's a major use case we're not meeting yet, and the survey results are strongly indicating that it's what we should tackle next. To that effect, I'm proposing we schedule a community sprint in early September. There's a couple of pilot projects working out the kinks of paged content (UT Austin, UNLV) whom we'd love to have involved, and hopefully we can synthesize this work and come up with a solution that will work for everybody.

Access Restrictions and Embargoes

A combination of core workflow and content_moderation modules with a handful of custom plugins can cover most of this. It won't be a zero code solution, but a couple of custom conditions and actions should do the trick.

OAI-PMH Endpoint

Kent State has developed an OAI-PMH module, and committer Seth Shaw has already whipped up sample configuration and a PR for it!

OCR Derivatives

UPEI has developed OCR derivatives for Islandora 8. It currently lives in their Github repo, but soon will make its way as into core islandora as a submodule.

Web Accessibility

Accessibility is something that must be kept in mind throughout all stages of development, and individual institutions must take care to ensure they do not introduce inaccessible portions of their site in their custom code. As a starting point for project that require accessibility (that's you if you work for university in the U.S. or Canada), we're looking to install our modules on top of the Web Experience Toolkit distribution.

Search and Discovery Improvements

Improvements to search and discovery can be contributed in the form of extra configuration. Tweaks to indexing and faceting can all be set up throught the UI and then exported.

IR Support

Replicating all of islandora_scholar from 7.x at first seems like a daunting task, but we've already made headway. We have entities for people, places, organizations, etc... in our controlled_access_terms module. UPEI has already developed citation generation using Twig templates as part of their RDM project. We've already outlined how we'll handle embargoes and access restrictions above, and we're planning on shipping with configuration to make Google Scholar indexing happen by default!

MODS Support

We have a lot of tools to get data out of MODS and into Islandora 8, but to generate MODS on the fly (or every time metadata is updated) we're going to use Twig templates like UPEI is doing for citations, Kent State is doing for OAI-PMH, and Diego Pino and Marcus Barnes are doing in their IMI and MIK tools for Islandora 7.

Versioning

Eli Zoller from Arizona State University has already contributed making versions with Chullo, our Fedora client. Further work to integrate that with the rest of Islandora is underway.

Dockerization

The ICG has plans for Islandora 8! The ISLE project for Islandora 7 has an upcoming phase III, which will provide docker containers for Islandora 8. Although not every organization uses Docker, Islandora 8's microservice based architecture goes hand in hand with Docker and Kubernetes. We can't wait to see the results!

Final Thoughts

We're always striving to give the community what they want, and surveys like this give us the data we need to do so. In the spirit of openness and transparency, we're releasing the results so you can draw your own conclusions. We hope you take the the time to view these results and let us know what you think. It's always easier to make decisions when you have data in front of you, and we're really grateful for all the people who took the time to fill out the survey. As our community continues to grow, we're hoping that surveys like these can help us guide development priorities (and more) in the future.

One of the features of Islandora events is a themed t-shirt given to all attendees. Every camp has its own logo, and so does each conference. We recently held a logo design contest to award a free registration and an extra t-shirt to the Islandoracon attendee who came up with the best logo to represent our third conference. We've held this contest before, but this year saw a record number of entries, making for a very close result.

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the Islandora 2019 Logo Contest is Hillary Webb, from the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, with this design that takes the coasts as inspiration while nodding to Islandora's doe-eyed lobster mascot:

Islandoracon will take place on the west cost, in Vancouver, BC, from October 7th - 11th. We hope you'll join us and proudly wear Hillary's design!

The team is full, the audits are complete, it's time to meet up to talk about the next steps for the Islandora 7.x-1.13 release. If you are on the team, or just interested in learning more, you are invited to tomorrow's meeting at 10:00 AM Eastern. Agenda here, with link to the Zoom meeting.

Islandora Camp went to Switzerland for the first time this summer, with a three-day camp hosted by Lib4RI - Library for the Research Institutes within the ETH domain: Eawag, Empa, PSI & WSL, and located at Eawag. You can see the full schedule (and as many set of presentation slides as we could gather) here, but the highlights came on the third day, with:

• an overview of the services our host provides to their internal users, including workflows and tools that make adding new material as quick and simple as possible for researchers,
• a look at the migration taken by the Max Plank Insitutuute for Pschyolinguistics to move their data into Islandora, including a solution pack with a viewer for 3D images like this,
• the amazing collections of the Fundación Juan March, and the way they integrate Islandora into a complex web of services.

The location itself was also a highlight, as we toured the peaceful, naturally landscaped campus of Eawag and hopped stepping-stones across the reclaimed river that runs through it:

Sessions were held in a low-energy building that deploys a myriad of clever tricks to provide a comfortable, modern, multi-storey office space while using no more electricity than a couple of single-family homes. It's also quite something to look at:

This Islandora Camp was the very first held since the release of Islandora 8, and our campers we eager to explore the new stack, with a half-day dedicated to site building Islandora 8 in the Admin Track, and the entire Developer Track spent (by audience request) on the new release.

If you want to experience your own immersion in all things Islandora, you can join us in October for our every-other-year full-week conference, Islandoracon, taking place from the 7th to the 11th in Vancouver, BC, Canada.