Background
The University of Canterbury leads the UC QuakeStudies component of the CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive. QuakeStudies collects content from the research community, community groups, peak agencies and other organisations involved with or affected by the earthquakes.
Opportunity
The University of Canterbury needed a digital library to handle a large amount of content and combine multiple media types from various organisations. Plus, they needed staff to be able to curate material and the collections to be easily explorable by the public.
The Government’s Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Learning and Legacy Programme, holding over 200 online items from multiple collections, needed a new home.
Solution
Catalyst transferred the collection items to UC QuakeStudies, which has now migrated to Islandora. Islandora is an open source digital asset management system able to home large amounts of content in various forms.
This solution enables lessons learned from the Canterbury earthquakes to be shared and preserved for the future. The focus is on community participation and commemoration, but the site also provides an essential resource for local and international researchers and students.
UC QuakeStudies,(external link) the single biggest node within the CEISMIC network, says “We're committed to making content freely and openly accessible to anyone interested in understanding the effects of the Canterbury earthquakes.”
The archive is easy to use and navigate, shaped by its contributors. People are free to view an array of story-telling materials in the form of photography, video, audio and written works.
The Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Learning collection includes documents from a wide range of Government and non-government organisations, such as:
- the Ministry for Women,
- the Red Cross,
- the Earthquake Commission,
- and the Human Rights Commission.
Plus, academic reports on 'how to respond to an emergency' and copies of key Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) documents. These add to the more than 150,000 items already stored in UC QuakeStudies.
Thanks to the nature of Catalyst’s open source solutions, this digital archive can continue to grow and evolve.
