Digitization is a huge topic here at LYRASIS just as we know it is for many of you, whether you are planning a digitization project, in the middle of a digitization project or thinking of changing your current platform for housing digital content and on the hunt for another that may suit your needs.
Whatever stage you’re in, LYRASIS can help. We currently offer Islandora hosting services for digital repositories.
Islandora
Built on Fedora Commons with a Drupal front-end layer, Islandora is a platform that is growing in popularity here at LYRASIS and across the country. Islandora takes digitized objects that can have unlimited relationships to each other and allows them to be accessed, managed and stored online, accessible to staff and the public. The system is flexible and yet very simple to use. Staff users of the system find out quickly that most of the heavy lifting occurs under one tab–Manage. Here, one can add an object to a collection, manage access, assign any restrictions, edit MODS metadata and replace or assign a thumbnail associated with the object. The system automatically performs OCR for full search capabilities and if you need to edit or correct OCR, it’s easy enough to do under the Manage tab.
For example, if you digitize a book, that book is a collection of jpeg images. You can upload by batch uploading a zip file of those images and the corresponding metadata. The book can then be part of a collection of books or can be connected to multiple collections.
Islandora is built on two widely used open source platforms, Fedora and Drupal. But if you don’t have the staff or time to run a Fedora-Drupal server, we have a hosted option with your choice of support and customization. In fact, one subscription model allows you to have complete access to the Drupal back end if customization and development are important to you, but if not, you can have as little care or worry and we’ll, LYRASIS, will keep the system up to date and running so you can focus on adding content.
For more information on LYRASIS Islandora Hosting Services, please contact digitalservices@lyrasis.org
If you are going to ALA in San Francisco, please stop by for our Friday demo of Islandora or visit us at booth #2341 for live demos throughout the weekend.