1. The Collections UofT Repository
and Enterprise Content Management
2014.05.06 - 11:20 AM - 12:00 PM
Toronto/Ryerson/York (TRY) Conference
Carr Hall, Room 406
Sara Allain, Special Collections Librarian, UTSC Library
Kelli Babcock, Digital Initiatives Librarian, UTL ITS
Danielle Robichaud, Archives Assistant, John M. Kelly Library, USMC
Karen Suurtamm, Archivist, UTARMS
Ken Yang, Digital Humanities Application Programmer, UTL ITS

2. Presentation Overview
1. Introducing the Collections UofT platform (Kelli)
2. Use case: UTARMS (Karen)
3. Use case: Nouwen family photograph albums (Danielle)
4. Use case: using OAI-PMH to share metadata (Sara)

3. What is Collections UofT?
http://collections.library.utoronto.ca/

4. What is Collections UofT?
Enterprise Content Management Approach
● Problem: How best to manage our digital
projects/digital assets while leveraging limited
resources?
● One possibility: a repository inspired by the
“enterprise content management” framework
● An enterprise content management approach
offers guidelines for the architecture and
management behind a repository, rather than
simply a technical solution

5. Enterprise Content
Management
Enterprise Content Management comprises the strategies, processes, methods,
systems, and technologies that are necessary for capturing, creating, managing, using,
publishing, storing, preserving, and disposing content
within and between organizations.
ECMs and Institutional Repositories: The Case for a Unified Enterprise Approach to Content Management
Malcolm Wolski, Natasha Simons and Joanna Richardson, 2013
http://eprints.utas.edu.au/16317/1/THETA_2013_Wolski.pdf

6. Enterprise Content Management
http://eprints.utas.edu.au/16317/1/THETA_2013_Wolski.pdf

7. Collections UofT: the system
http://islandora.ca/

8. Collections UofT:
an Islandora sandwich
Top layer: Drupal
Middle bits: Islandora tools
Bottom layer: Fedora commons

9. Collaborator Multi-Sites
http://collections.library.utoronto.ca/
● http://ealcollections.library.utoronto.ca/
● http://govinfocollections.library.utoronto.ca/
● http://usmccollections.library.utoronto.ca/
● http://fishercollections.library.utoronto.ca/
● http://utarmscollections.library.utoronto.ca/
● etc...

10. Metadata Conundrum

11. Enabling collaboration

12. Islandora and the U of T Archives
Karen Suurtamm, Archivist
U of T Archives & Records Management Services (UTARMS)

13. Our digitized content
● Lansdale fonds
o Total: 50,000
o Digitized: 27,000
o Online: 3,500
● Photos
o Total: 250,000+
o Online: 2000
● Published material
o Total: 2400+ titles
o Online: 14 titles;
57,000 pages
● Textual records
o Total: 11,000+ m
o Online: barely anything

14. Heritage site
● Initiated by President’s office
● Created by ITS; launched 2012
● Scope: U of T history
● Material from repositories across U of T
o UTARMS
o Fisher
o UTSC
o UTM

18. Benefits of Heritage Site
● Increased exposure
● Search and browse across repositories
● Easy browsing/searching for internal use
● Faceted browsing
● Multimedia: photographs, documents, maps, drawings,
films, books
● Increased collaboration

19. Exhibits

20. Chronology

21. Social media

22. Limitations of Heritage
● Strict mandate/scope
● Another ‘place’ to look for things
● Not linked back to our website and archival descriptions
● Little control over how our material displays

24. Collections:
U of T Archives multi-site
● Central space : decentralized workflow
● More control over collection display
● Own look/feel for our page
● Can build our own menu items: About, Contact, How to
cite, etc.
● Content is unlimited in scope

25. Islandora for Archives: Benefits
● Supports multiple formats
● Open source
o Can build/add/adapt
o Room to grow/change
o community/collaboration
● Pairing with other software
o Exhibits (Timeline etc)
o Preservation (Archivematica)
o Description (AtoM)

26. Islandora for Archives:
Challenges
● Communicating that ‘this isn’t everything’
● Use of the term ‘collections’
● Metadata: balancing cohesion and autonomy with other
professions/sectors
● Preserving/communicating context
● Preserving/communicating hierarchical arrangement

31. Nouwen Family
Photograph Albums
Page 38 of
Album 16
Danielle
Robichaud
Archives Assistant
John M. Kelly Library
USMC

32. Meet the Nouwens
Maria and Laurent J.M. Nouwen’s 25th wedding anniversary (April 1956)
P6133
Page 28 of
Album 1

33. Project Overview
● 18 photograph albums donated in 2012
● 650 pages with more than 4000 photographs
● Funding was provided for the digitization and
description of the albums
● Online access key component of agreement
● Albums compiled by the Nouwen family and
Henri Nouwen

34. Page 12
of
Album 18

35. Page 6
of
Album 12

36. Page 20
of
Album 5

37. Page 21
of
Album 3

38. Why Collections U of T?
● Higher profile for USMC Collections
● Allows for centralized online dissemination
with built-in IT support
● Access to academic audience
● Collections U of T collaborators as built-in
community of practice

39. Challenges
● Photograph albums don’t align with the Book
or Large Image Content models
● Resources, time and knowledge required for
site customization and configuration
● Archival descriptive standards vs Dublin
Core basic elements

40. Solution: Thinking Out Loud

42. How Do You Solve a Problem Like UTSC?
● The DSU at UTSC has its own Islandora
o We use it in different ways than ITS
o Not an institutional repository but an organic digital
scholarship tool that we need to be able to
experiment with
● But we think it’s important to contribute!

43. Learn to Share!
● Create a search interface that will find our
stuff via Collections UofT without the effort of
ingesting it twice
● OAI-PMH: Open Archives Initiative Protocol
for Metadata Harvesting

44. Metadata Harvesting via OAI-PMH
UTSC
metadata
available via
Islandora OAI
module
Collections
UofT
harvester
Request made via HTTP
Dublin Core XML gathered
via OAI-PMH
Metadata made available
via Collections UofT site

45. Pros and Cons of OAI-PMH
Advantages:
● Relatively easy
● Minimal duplication of
ingest effort
● No loss if UTSC decides
to change how we use
Collections UofT
Issues:
● User interface changes
● Only harvests simple
Dublin Core
● Out of date - ATOM,
ResourceSync, or LOD
could do this better

46. Questions?
Contact us
Sara: sallain@utsc.utoronto.ca, @archivalistic
Kelli: kelli.babcock@utoronto.ca, @kelllib
Danielle: danielle.robichaud@utoronto.ca, @danielleganza
Karen:karen.suurtamm@utoronto.ca, @UTArchives
Ken: ken.yang@utoronto.ca, @kenyangzj