drupal

Islandora and nginx

Background I have been doing a fair bit of scale testing for York University Digital Library over the last couple weeks. Most of it has been focused on horizontal scaling of the traditional Islandora stack (Drupal, Fedora Commons, FedoraGSearch, Solr, and aDORe-Djtatoka). The stack is traditionally run with Apache2 in front of it, and it reverse proxies parts of the stack that are Tomcat webapps. I was curious if the stack would work with nginx, and if I would get any noticeable improvements by just switching from Apache2 to nginx.

Digital Preservation Tools and Islandora

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.

Islandora Web ARChive Solution Pack

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.

DPLA Appfest Drupal integration

Below is the output of the little project I worked on today at the DPLA Appfest. It definitely isn’t a perfect solution to the problem. It is not a drop-in module to just grab a collection from the DPLA API and "curate" it in your library’s Drupal site. I hate reinventing the wheel especially if there are existing modules that can solve the problem for you. Moreover, as one of the few people that still respects what OAI-PMH does, it would be worth considering using DPLA as and OAI-PMH provider.

Islandora development visualization

Hit a bit of a wall yesterday getting checksums working when ingesting content into Islandora, so I made a Gource video of the Islandora commits in my fork of the git repo. Music by RipCD (@drichert) and myself. How’d I do it? I wanted to use the Gravatars, so I used this handy little perl script. Hopped into the Islandora git repo, and ran: gource --user-image-dir .git/avatar/ -s 3 --auto-skip-seconds 0.

FITS and Islandora integration

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).

Right! That hackfest report I should have gave...

When I was at Islandora Camp trying to wrap my head around all things Islandora and Fedora, I was thinking ahead about a possible project in archives and research collections - migrating our collection/fonds descriptions and finding aids over to ICA AtoM.   ICA AtoM does some pretty cool stuff in terms of access to collection/fonds descriptions, integrates very nicely with Archivematica with accessioning born digital objects, and associating digital representations of item level objects with their respective collection/fonds.

Fail, Fail, Fail, Success?

This past week I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at Access 2011 about failing entitled, "If you ain't failin', you ain't tryin'!" Amy Buckland moderated the panel where we each took five minutes to tell a library tech fail story to encourage the audience to share their failure stories. I think it went over great, and was cathartic to say the least.   I shared my story, and afterword I had that familiar feeling of "but, wait!

Node Import fails me | Hack the database!

Over on the dev version of our digital collections site we are working on lots of new features. One of them being JPEG2000 support for our World War I trench maps, World War I aerial photos, and World War II Italian topographical maps. Lightbox2 simply does not cut it when researchers would like to examine these wonderful images. Being that we are pretty short staffed here and don't have the wherewithall to whip up a Drupal module to do this "properly", we have come up with what I think is a pretty creative solution to adding the jp2 images to the records in Drupal.

Library day in the life - 5 - Day 5

Here we are at the final day. Friday. Work from home. WIN. VPN, shell, type, type type, forward ports, oh man, email. Morning Morning soundtrack - Four Tet - Remixes, Plaid - Parts in the Post Finally finished all of the field merges. Now on to some batch metadata field editing for the World War, 1939-1945, Jewish Underground Resistance Collection. Metadata must be accurate, metadata must be correct! Sorry, no link for this collection for the public yet since it is being populated on the dev version of the site.