2016-05-16

We have a particularly interesting Islandora Show & Tell this week, with the archives of the Berklee College of Music. The collection includes (of course) some pretty great music from their students, but also extends to event programs, oral histories, scrapbooks, and other products of their student's graduate projects.

They use some minor customizations of the Newspaper Solution Pack to fit it to their event programs, displaying a title per every “Islandora Newspaper Issue,” which provides more context and metadata for events. Some more involved customizations went into creating their “Highlighted Items” block, which appears on the landing page. It's done with a Drupal block module that taps into the Islandora / Tuque API with a custom web form; the team enters PIDs for the objects they want to display. There are also smaller customizations to the user interface spread throughout the site, such as navigation breadcrumbs, “page rotation” options in the OpenSeaDragon plugin, a new “viewer” module that replaces the Internet Archive Book Reader, and in the back end, heavily customized XML to create a simplified interface for non-archives staff. Once they get their configurations locked down, they have plans to share their details in the Islandora Deployments repo.

Which is all very cool. But since I'm the one reviewing this collection, it's all about the cats. Berklee's archives (specially, their event programs), do not disappoint. Front and centre on the search results page is The Cat's Pajamas. Not to be outdone by Cats 'N Spats. Or, my personal favourite to invent a context for: Our Cat Is Sleeping On Your Back Porch.

And on those notes, let's hear from Sofía Becerra-Licha and Ernie Gillis about how their collection came together:

What is the primary purpose of your repository? Who is the intended audience?

The mission of the Archives at Berklee College of Music is to preserve and provide access to institutional history as well as special collections focusing on popular music. Our audience includes Berklee faculty, staff, current students, and alumni on both campuses (Boston and Valencia) as well as a diverse array of outside researchers and casual viewers. Given the College’s emphasis on technological innovation and our very limited physical space on campus, digital access to collections has been a priority since the Archives’ establishment in 2012.

Our online presence is divided into two parts: an institutional repository containing master’s capstone projects and digital collections consisting of both institutional records and special collections. The institutional repository  both showcase recent graduates’ work and is actively used by the graduate student body and their faculty as research and reference materials. Our digital collections include oral histories chronicling Berklee and Boston popular music history, materials relating to the Schillinger System of Musical Composition upon which Berklee’s distinctive curriculum was based, and other curricular and institutional highlights.

Why did you choose Islandora?

This repository was a long time coming. Area requirements included an open-source solution and the ability to ably manage audiovisual assets. Originally, the Learning Resources technical team attempted to build a repository structure from scratch, resulting in several iterations over the past decade before discovering and settling on the Fedora Repository structure. Then, over the last five years, Learning Resources as a whole (including the College Archives and Berklee’s library) migrated to a Drupal-based CMS. Given these developments and the want & necessity of sticking to open source solutions, Islandora emerged as a perfect fit to both match the CMS migration to Drupal and tap into the offerings of Fedora. In short, Islandora fit our workflow management needs and open source requirements.

Which modules or solution packs are most important to your repository?

Audio Solution Pack (for audio files such as those in our institutional repository)

Book Solution Pack (for the scrapbook in this collection)

Compound Object Solution Pack (Berklee Oral History Project “combiner”)

Newspapers (modified for our event programs)

Paged Content Module (to make the book for book solution)

Video Solution Pack (for any video, such as the BOHP)

Web ARChives (for Jazz In The Classroom)

Form Builder (to create custom forms for metadata entry)

What feature of your repository are you most proud of?

Some highlights:

Using the Newspaper Solution Pack to present our campus event programs, organized chronologically by venue: https://archives.berklee.edu/bca-009-bcm-event-programs.

Incorporating TurnJS for multi page object viewing (to replace Internet Archive Book Reader)

SOLR integration and configuration fine tuning

Who built/developed/designed your repository (i.e, who was on the team?)

We’re a small team of three-ish. Web development and design work was done by the Manager of Learning Resources Web Development (Ernie Gillis) and Senior Web Developer (Jaesung Song), in consultation with the College Archivist (Sofía Becerra-Licha), who assisted with content development and ingest. In the planning and implementation stages, the team had input from the Director of Library Services and the Dean of Learning Resources. 12 shared work-study students were collaboratively employed in the areas of digitization (6), graphic design (2), web development (2), and archival processing (2).

Do you have plans to expand your site in the future?

Yes! Modules we plan to install and/or implement include OAI and Scholar. Planned improvements to local functionality development and design include: SSO rights management, implementing a (TBD) library services discovery layer, and improving responsive and mobile design interfaces for Islandora/Fedora Objects. With regard to asset management and creation, we plan to add:

Closed captioning for videos (such as oral histories)

Real time streaming for on demand audio / video (for improved control over downloads, and for better mobile or remote / low data access via adaptive bitrate)

PDF to Image & image protection (to better control high quality download of certain images or graphic objects)

EAD / Finding Aids as Fedora Objects

Web technology objects (for HTML5 SVG objects, or other web animation types)

What is your favourite object in your collection to show off?

The scrapbook in the Franklin McGinley collection on Duke Ellington (BCA-004). Great illustrations, fun clippings, musician autographs, and more! 

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