‘Twas a world of limited options for digital libraries just a few short years back. Nowadays, however, the options are many more and the features and functionalities are truly groundbreaking.
Before I dive into some of the latest whizzbang technologies that have caught my eye, let me lay out the platforms we currently use and why we use them.
- Digital Commons for our institutional repository. This is a simple yet powerful hosted repository service. It has customizable workflows built into it for managing and publishing online journals, conferences, e-books, media galleries and much more. And, I’d emphasize the “service” aspect. Included in the subscription comes notable SEO power, robust publishing tools, reporting, stellar customer service and, of course, you don’t have to worry about the technical upkeep of the platform.
- CONTENTdm for our digital collections. There was a time that OCLC’s digital collections platform appeared to be on a development trajectory that would take out of the clunky mire it was in say in 2010. They’ve made strides, but this has not kept up.
- LUNA for restricted image reserve services. You and your faculty can build collections in this system popular with museums and libraries alike. Your collection also sits within the LUNA Commons, which means users of LUNA can take advantage of collections outside their institutions.
- Omeka.net for online exhibits and digital humanities projects. The limited cousin to the self-hosted Omeka, this version is an easy way to launch multiple sites for your campus without having to administer multiple installs. But it has a limited number of plugins and options, so your users will quickly grow out of it.
The Movers and Shakers of 2015
There are some very interesting developments out there and so here is a brief overview of a few of the three most ground-breaking, in my opinion.
PressForward
If you took Blog DNA and spliced it with Journal Publishing, you’d get a critter called PresForward: a WordPress plug-in that allows users to launch publications that approach publishing from a contemporary web publishing perspective.
There are a number of ways you can use PressForward but the most basic publishing model its intended for starts with treating other online publications (RSS feeds from individuals, organizations, other journals) as sources of submissions. Editors can add external content feeds to their submission feed, which bring that content into their PressForward queue for consideration. Editors can then go through all the content that is brought in automatically from outside and then decide to include it in their publication. And of course, locally produced content is also included if you’re so inclined.
Examples of PressForward include:
Islandora
Built on Fedora Commons with a Drupal front-end layer, Islandora is a truly remarkable platform that is growing in popularity at a good clip. A few years back, I worked with a local consortia examining various platforms and we looked at Islandora. At the time, there were no examples of the platform being put into use and it felt more like an interesting concept more than a tool we should recommend for our needs. Had we been looking at this today, I think it would have been our number one choice.
Part of the magic with Islandora is that it uses RDF triples to flatten your collections and items into a simple array of objects that can have unlimited relationships to each other. In other words, a single image can be associated with other objects that all relate as a single object (say a book of images) and that book object can be part of a collection of books object, or, in fact, be connected to multiple other collections. This is a technical way of saying that it’s hyper flexible and yet very simple.
And because Islandora is built on two widely used open source platforms, finding tech staff to help manage it is easy.
But if you don’t have the staff to run a Fedora-Drupal server, Lyrasis now offers hosted options that are just as powerful. In fact, one subscription model they offer allows you to have complete access to the Drupal back end if customization and development are important to you, but you dont’ want to waste staff time on updates and monitoring/testing server performance.
Either way, this looks like a major player in this space and I expect it to continue to grow exponentially. That’s a good thing too, because some aspects of the platform are feeling a little “not ready for prime time.” The Newspaper solution pack, for example, while okay, is no where near as cool as what Veridian currently can do.
ArtStor’s SharedShelf
Rapid development has taken this digital image collection platform to a new level with promises of more to come. SharedShelf integrates the open web, including DPLA and Google Images, with their proprietary image database in novel ways that I think put LUNA on notice.
Like LUNA, SharedShelf allows institutions to build local collections that can contain copyrighted works to be used in classroom and research environments. But what sets it apart is that it allows users to also build beyond their institutions and push that content to the open web (or not depending on the rights to the images they are publishing).
SharedShelf also integrates with other ArtStor services such as their Curriculum Guides that allow faculty to create instructional narratives using all the resources available from ArtStor.
The management layer is pretty nice and works well with a host of schema.
And, oh, apparently audio and video support is on the way.
Fail!lab 