KLN Repository Service : Fedora with Islandora: Home

The Repository Service consists of three basic open source components:

1. Fedora Commons - this is the "bucket" into which content is deposited.  It handles the objects, preservation, uniquely addressing the content, much of the important technical stuff that needs to happen so our stuff is available years into the future.
2. Drupal - the modular framework for basic functionality that Islandora is built upon.  This is the layer that staff and users would interact with most directly.  Islandora is a suite of drupal modules / workflows designed using Drupal to manage digital objects; Drupal is also a content management system that can make objects/information available to users through a web presentation.  Paying attention to what Drupal can do for users via newly developed modules is just as important for PRESENTING and making the content available as what Islandora can do for making the back office kinds of activities work smoothly. 
3. Solr - is the tool that indexes all the content that has been placed into the Fedora repository via the Islandora tool set.  Solr enables users to search across the meta-data, full text, conduct facets, limits, etc.  If you're doing more than browsing or drilling down through menus, you're probably using Solr.

First, there is the "sandbox" environment.  Can we get the application and it's modules to work through any means.

Second, there is the "dev" (aka development) environment.  After having learned how things work and interact together in the sandbox, the development environment is established to facilitate learning about how to properly configure the applications for sustainability and proper system maintenance and backup, redundancy and business continuity.

Third, there is the "production" environment.  Where the application itself works and is configured properly; its running on a machine that has been properly configured and tuned for what it's supposed to do and included as appropriate in the broader technical infrastructure for use in a secure and sustainable way. 

There is a "path to production" that looks like:

Start with Sandbox Environment; then Development Environment; and lastly a Production Environment 

Typically once an application and it's environment has been worked out and stablized, the "dev" and "prod" environments will flip back and forth to facilitate upgrades without downtime.  Process works along these lines:  Bring "dev" to production status, test doing the upgrade on it, if it worked, then it becomes the new "prod" environment and the old "prod" becomes the new "dev" environment.  ContentDM has been done this way for several years.

As of Wed, April 2, 2014:

Many things are currently installed in the sandbox but not all components are fully configured and usable. The focus for the sandbox was to provide minimal, introductory functionality to get users accustomed to the basic premise of Islandora. The functionality that users will most be concerned with is provided in the various solution packs that UPEI has developed for adding and managing content. The following solution packs are installed. Ones in bold are either untested or have had problems. All are on version 7.x-1.1:

• Audio
• Basic collections
• Basic image
• Book
• Large Image
• PDF
• Video

Other significant modules that have been untested, also 7.x-1.1:

• Batch importer
• Google Scholar
• OCR

Solr is not setup in the sandbox and by extension searching is not currently possible. The Islandora community is continuously working on improving existing modules and adding new ones. Already in 7.x-1.2 a newspaper and compound object modules have been added with more on the road ahead.

The KLN Fedora / Islandora sandbox instance is available and is what we'll be using today.

If we find an instance with a reasonable "look and feel" or some very specific functionality, here would be the place to indicate it.  Odds are that we can get that since this is all open source.

To help the HUB prioritize and focus efforts to keep things manageable, we should have a sense of what we think is more important / less important.  This doesn't have to be set in stone, but some guidance about what we would find "more" vs. "less" useful I suspect would appreciated.