This Show & Tell has been in the making ever since Joanna DiPasquale presented at the Islandora Conference on how Vassar has started to store and display panoramic images in Islandora. Vassar has a pretty impressive array of collections, spanning images, videos, audio, and books that stretch the presentation of a "book" in Islandora. All of this is mediated through some small but significant customizations, such as modifications to the Internet Archive book viewer to display translated pages and feed the MODS record to a 'details' tab. Vassar also runs a custom Solr configuration which runs a transitive SPARQL query of the resource index when a record is ingested or updated. The query reports the collection tree of the object, which then gets written into Solr, creating a new facet and the option to do a “search just this collection” feature. You can find many of these customizations on Joanna DiPasquale's GitHub.
Vassar is also one of several Islandora sites making use of the Islandora OAI module to easily harvest their records for the DPLA. They also deserve our thanks for being the initial sponsors of the Islandora Book Batch module, which has greatly streamlined the process of ingesting books for the entire community.
Those are the technical details. As for content, I like to judge a collection by what happens when I throw "cats" into a search box, and I was not disappointed. The result are mainly from diaries, but the quotes (easy to grab because of great OCR) are wonderful, such as:
Vassar has the greatest number of cats around. There are pretty cats and homely cats. There is one half-blind cat, and one three footed cat. The cats with whom we are best acquanted are a large black cat and a gray and white cat. The black cat is a great favorite of Stematz's. She has often been in here and has made herself quite at home. The gray and white cat was here all one day last week, and we didn't know but she'd taken up her abode here. Over on the north corridor are a gray cat and two kittens, which belong to Miss Jones. The kittens are very pretty and nice, and have very noble titles, Julius Caesar and Tiberius Gracchus.
-Wyman, Anne (Southworth). Diary, 1878-1880 (page 84)
For the poor homely cats, or:
When does Mrs. Foote go? She doth much deceive [me]. She does not go. Lately she catches mice. Let me relate an incident! A mouse finds his way to the shrine of her cupboard. The mouse don't know much. How should she get him out! Allie Wright has a cat. Hattie is stationed at the cupboard door to hold it tight while Mrs. F. goes for the cat. The cat is brought & introduced unceremoniously "Now, kitty, get it quick!" (Mew). "Come kitty" (Mew) "Have you got it kitty?" (Mew) "There I guess she's got it". (Mew).
Did she? O, sad sequel. O, blighted hopes. The mouse is still alive.
- Bromley, Frances M. Diary, 1872 (page 282)
Because "O sad sequel. O blighted hopes. The mouse is still alive," is a phrase that needs to be worked into modern conversation far more often. Or:
He saw a cross between a monkey and a cat, and a cat and a rabbit.
- John Burroughs Journal, 1888-1889 (page 38)
Because that's an amazing family tree.
And that's just the cats. Vassar Digital Library's collections extend to some pretty amazing places, which I will let Joanna DiPasquale describe:
What is the primary purpose of your repository? Who is the intended audience?
Vassar College’s digital repository aims to provide access to a wide variety of digital materials to our faculty and students as well as to researchers around the world. We have documents, letters, diaries, oral histories, papers, and even some art images. As our website states, “Through our digital collections, we aim to provide access to high-quality digital content generated by the Libraries for research and study, as open as possible; support the teaching, learning, and research needs of the College; preserve at-risk or fragile physical collections through digitization, or at-risk born-digital collections through reformatting; expose hidden, less-used physical collections through access to digital surrogates; and foster experimental, cutting-edge, and innovative projects through technology.”
Why did you choose Islandora?
We chose Islandora for both philosophical and practical reasons. Philosophically, I am a strong open-source proponent, and when we were looking at software for our nascent digital library, Islandora clearly fit the bill: it is an open-source product that merges two open-source products (Drupal and Fedora Commons) in a streamlined way. It also has a very active user community that drives new features, and our needs were fairly close to those features on the roadmap. But we had some practical concerns: since we are a small liberal arts college with very limited digital library staff, we also needed vendor support services for things we could not do ourselves. The availability of companies such as discoverygarden (DGI) helped enormously when we chose Islandora.
Which modules or solution packs are most important to your repository?
We use a combination of the Book Content Model solution pack with the Islandora Importer, Book Batch, IA Book Viewer, and Islandora Solr modules most frequently. We have a significant amount of multi-page objects (letters, diaries, minutes, etc.) that are either OCRed or manually transcribed, and these modules bring these objects to life. We import items into our repository and, because of Islandora, we can provide a very readable, full-text-searchable, page-by-page view (even with zoomable images!) of each complex object.
One other thing to note is that the Forms capabilities of Islandora are amazing. I couldn’t work without this critical functionality. I am able to provide incredibly complicated metadata forms to our lab manager or student workers so that they can make changes to our records, and they are able to focus exclusively on content without ever worrying about how to make those changes.
What feature of your repository are you most proud of?
One of my favorite collections is the Albert Einstein Digital Collection at Vassar College Libraries, made possible by a grant from Dr. Georgette Bennett in honor of Dr. Leonard Polonsky CBE. It contains our “2-up” text viewer for multilingual content, and I think that this viewer represents the amazing combination of liberal arts need with large-scale repository functionality.
The repository features letters from Einstein about more social and political issues, rather than purely scientific ones, so it really documents a lesser-known aspect of Einstein’s life. But the content had been underutilized because much of it was in German, and many students could not read the materials. Vassar is an undergraduate institution, so when we digitized the collection, we believed it was incredibly important to provide both the German transcription of each letter as well as an English translation for our students. We worked with the wonderful translators from Caltech to provide these materials, and then with help from Discovery Garden, we built a new feature into the IA Book Viewer to show the German and English datastreams side-by-side. So now the repository searches and displays both German and English, which aids researchers that bring different language skills to their work.
Who built/developed/designed your repository (i.e., who was on the team?)
Generally, I am responsible for the repository; I’ve developed its functionality beyond core Islandora, designed the user interface, created processing scripts, developed new modules, etc. I also work with our amazing digital lab manager, Sharyn Cadogan, who is not only an extraordinary imaging specialist but also a terrific project manager and supervisor to a team of students. When we started down the Islandora road, Discovery Garden provided much-needed expertise for core Islandora, Fedora, and the entire application stack – they installed, tested, and got our repository off the ground, and we still maintain close ties with them. Our central information technology group on campus generously provides server space for this important campus resource, for which I am grateful!
Do you have plans to expand your site in the future?
Always, always. We are poised to scale up in interesting and amazing ways, and I’m looking forward to the future. In the past four years, we have digitized and made available more than 60,000 pieces of content across multiple collections. This content has generally focused on material from our Archives & Special Collections Library, and we will continue to build collections with that focus. But we are also moving into more digital scholarship areas, and many of the modules and features of Islandora Scholar will most likely find their way into Vassar’s repository as this area increases.
What is your favourite object in your collection to show off?
There are so many great items and collections! Here are a few that I love:
One of my favorite collections contains the personal papers of the U.S. suffragist Susan B. Anthony, which provides interesting materials about abolition as well as suffrage.
One of our most beautiful items is the 1685 early anatomy book by Govard Bidloo, Anatomia humani corporis.
Did you know that Albert Einstein often wrote poetry to friends and family? (I didn’t!) This is such a sweet poem, and it shows off the “2-up”/multilingual feature of the IA Book Viewer.