Incorporating a suite of digital preservation tools into various Islandora workflows has been a long-term goal of mine and a few other members in the community, and I’m really happy to see that it is now becoming more and more of a priority in the community.
A couple years ago, I cut my teeth on contributing to Islandora by creating a FITS plugin for the Drupal 6 version of Islandora. Later this tool was expanded to a stand alone module with restructuring of the Drupal 7 code base of Islandora. The Drupal 7 version of Islandora, along with Tuque, has really opened up the door for community contributions over the last year or so. Below is a list and description of Islandora modules with a particular focus to the preservation side of the repository platform.
Islandora Checksum
Islandora Checksum is a module that I developed with Adam Vessey (with special thanks to help from Jonathan Green and Jordan Dukart who helped me grok Tuque), that allows repository managers to enable the creation of a checksums for all datastreams on objects. If enabled, the repository administrator can choose from default Fedora Commons checksum algorithms: MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512.
This module is licensed under a GPLv3 license, and currently going through the Islandora Foundation’s Licensed Software Acceptance Procedure. If successfull, the module will be apart of the next Islandora release.
Islandora Checksum Checker
Islandora Checksum Checker is a module by Mark Jordan that extends Islandora Checksum by verifying, “the checksums derived from Islandora object datastreams and adds a PREMIS ‘fixity check’ entry to the object’s audit log for each datastream checked.”
This module is also licensed under a GPLv3 license.
Islandora PREMIS
Islandora PREMIS is a module by Mark Jordan, Donald Moses, Paul Pound, and myself. The module produces XML and HTML representations of PREMIS metadata for objects in an Islandora repository on the fly. The module currently documents: all fixity checks performed on an object’s datastreams, includes configurable ‘agent’ entries for an institution as well as for the Fedora Commons software, and maps the contents of each object’s “rights” elements in the Dublic Core datastream to equivalent PREMIS “rightsExtension” elements. You can view an example here, along with the XML representation.
What we have implemented so far is just the basics, and we are always seeking feedback to make it better. If you’re interested in the discussion or would like to provide feedback, feel free to follow along in the Islandora Google Group thread, and the Github issue queue for the project.
This module is also licensed under a GPLv3 license.
Islandora BagIt
Islandora BagIt is also a module by Mark Jordan (actually a fork of his Drupal module) that utilizes Scholars’ Lab’s BagItPHP, allowing repository administrators to create bags of selected content. Currently a wide variety of configuration options for exporting contents as Bags, as well as creating Bags on ingest and/or when objects are modified. The way Mark has structured this module also allows developers to easily extend it by creating additional plugins for it, as well providing Drush integration.
This module is also licensed under a GPLv3 license.
Islandora Preservation Documentation
Documentation! One of the most important aspects of digital preservation.
This is not a full blown module yet. What it currently is, is the beginings of a generic set of documentation that can be used by repository administrators. Eventually we hope to use a combination of Default Content/UUID Features and Features to provide a default bundle of preservation documenation in an Islandora installation.
The content in this Github repo comes from the documentation and policies we are creating at York University Library, which is derived from the wonderful documentation created by Scholars Portal during their successful ISO 16363 audit.
