Detroit Public Library Digital Collections on Islandora

The Detroit Public Library was seeking a solution for storing, managing, and displaying the nearly 65,000 digital images from their special collections that had been digitized so far with the ability to easily ingest more images in the future. The site was launched successfully in October.

In this presentation we will describe why DPL chose Islandora as the solution for their repository. Many libraries are building robust digital asset management systems using Islandora, a framework centered around Drupal, the Fedora Repository Project, and Apache Solr. We will discuss the needs of libraries for these types of repository platforms and why Islandora, because it incorporates Drupal as a key component, is often a sensible solution.

We will show how librarians using Islandora with a familiar Drupal interface can:

• define multiple metadata schemas
• ingest digital objects of any file type
• customize metadata entry forms
• manage the workflow of creating digital collections
• publish standards-compliant metadata records for harvesting

Additionally we will demonstrate some customizations to Islandora that:

• allow greater interoperability with the Drupal entity system
• provide additional options for viewing images
• improve the indexing of records in Apache Solr