The following is the text for a video that I was asked to record for the 2014 International Internet Preservation Consortium General Assembly Curator Tools Fair, on the Islandora Web ARChive solution pack.
My name is Nick Ruest. I am a librarian at York University, in Toronto, Ontario. I’m going to give a quick presentation on the Islandora Web ARChive solution pack. I only have a few minutes, so I’ll quickly cover what the module does, what areas of the web archiving life cycle it covers, and a provide a quick demonstration.
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.
What is it? The Islandora Web ARChive Solution Pack is yet another Islandora Solution Pack. This particular solution pack provides the necessary Fedora objects for persisting and disseminating web archive objects; warc files.
What does it do? Currently, the SP allows a user to upload a warc with an associated MODS form. Once the object is deposited, the associated metadata is displayed along with a download link to the warc file.
Digital preservationistas rejoice?
I managed to get FITS integration working in Islandora via a plugin. The plugin will automatically create a FITS xml datastream for an object upon ingest in the Islandora interface for a given solution pack. Right now I have it working with the Basic Image Solution Pack, Large Image Solution Pack, and PDF Solution Pack. You just have to make sure fits.sh is in your apache user's path (thanks @adr).
Do you have a computer or server sitting around running Linux, and want to help out a good cause? Then you should check out one of the active Archive Team projects. "Archive Team is a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage." Basically, this wonderful group of people monitors the internet for sites/services that are about to disappear, and do their absolute best to make sure these things are preserved.