Catalyst migrate and preserve over 210,000 digital records

Background

Archives Central(external link) operates a physical storage facility in Feilding and an online database of metadata and digital records. The records include:

• photos

• maps

• plans on behalf of a consortium of councils in the North Island of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Also known as Manawatū-Whanganui Local Authority Shared Services Limited (MWLASS).

Challenge

Archives Central had used the Kete system that had served well for over ten years. However, the Kete system had not attracted a sufficient community to stay current with the expectations of modern digital collection management.

Solution

After reviewing options, Archives Central chose to replace Kete with Islandora 8. The decision was based on the need to track physical items (photographs, plans, maps) and born-digital items such as digital photographs.

The move encompassed over 210,000 records - including 7,000 images and 600 PDF documents.

Islandora 8 is a next-generation digital asset management solution that can store any digital file. The Islandora-based solution integrates multiple open source components such as:

• the Drupal content management system

• Fedora Commons repository

• Solr text search

• Numerous micro-services for image processing, and video and audio transcoding.

Migration of data

The migration from Kete was performed using Drupal's extensive Migration framework. The framework offers an Extract-Transform-Load toolchain to move data into Drupal from a variety of sources.

A part of the migration extended the data model to include other entities beyond Records in Contexts (RiC), such as Accessions, Locations and Containers. Since accessions are not included in the existing RiC model, we reused many of the same fields defined for Records and Record Sets. The fields included Name, Identifier, Structure and more. We also added custom fields to suit Archive Central’s workflow.

The team also took this opportunity to improve data quality by:

• identifying and correcting some spelling errors

• improving consistency of phrasing

• reducing duplication of fields across entities.

Search

Islandora incorporates the popular Apache Solr search engine, offering powerful search capability, including field and full-text search, facets, sorting and stemming.

Plus, Islandora is able to extract text from PDFs and even perform optical character recognition on typed documents.

Theming

The design is simple, easy to navigate, uncluttered, and emphasises the content wherever possible.

The system includes an in-browser viewer for PDF documents giving a more visually appealing and immediately useful display of documents.

Also, for high-resolution scans of aerial photographs or plans the system displays smoothly zoomable images.

Hosting and support

The solution is fully hosted in the Catalyst Cloud(external link)(external link). Catalyst system administrators created multiple environments for development and testing to monitor and maintain the systems. Plus, the site usage is tracked via Catalyst's local instance of Matomo analytics.

This solution provides a platform to meet immediate archiving and discovery needs while having the flexibility to accommodate rapid changes to archival practice and the increasing prevalence of born-digital material.

If you would like to level up your digital library, contact our experts today.