August 20, 2020

Islandora 8 Users Call

This meeting is held virtually via Zoom, with an open channel for chatter on Slack. Anyone is welcome to join. Here is the info:

Time: 1:00pm Eastern Standard Time US (UTC-5)
Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89540768642
Join us on the Slack Islandora 8 Channel https://islandora.slack.com/archives/CM5PPAV28

These are the main questions addressed under the agenda item "what do we want to get from this call?"

What are folks doing to learn about I8? Installations vs. online sandbox?

some installations, online sandbox also used as reference point for questions about the system

How are you getting content into the instance you're learning with?

not everyone is populating content yet, single-item upload through form; question of whether anyone is using workbench
discussion of workbench: currently only in command line, plan to develop to be spreadsheet editor, but that will take more resources (more time for Seth to work on it or another developer to pick it up)
for I7, use of IMI, similar use of spreadsheet/CSV and path to bring items in for ingest will be important for users in I8. In particular, a way to control metadata mapping in a GUI as part of ingest would be valuable.
The working prototype for Workbench would create a column for every field in the content type you select, and would provide appropriate taxonomy terms in dropdowns, to pull Drupal form editing affordances into spreadsheet. (Seth)
The underlying idea of Workbench is to democratize the workflow and tools to create and update metadata in Islandora 8 (modeled on an earlier CONTENTdm tool). (Mark)
Workbench does allow for updating existing metadata from a spreadsheet, but ingest is simpler (Mark)
Questions about how this would relate to batch or bulk updates in Drupal, which have some limitations in scale.

How much should Drupal contrib modules be included in Islandora?

From a maintenance perspective, hesitate to include contrib modules as default because support can go away. Prefer a recipe page because that doesn't imply endorsement or long-term support from Islandora.
Would rather see Islandora community support standard Drupal contrib modules.
Don't want to promise something that can't be supported.
Finding support for a widely used contrib module would be preferable to each institution coming up with different way to do something.

To what extent do Drupal distributions deal with this problem and mitigate or reduce the burden on the user to figure out recipes?

Bundle pre-packaged solutions
Is a bundle of already configured workflows a possible direction?
Need to do risk analysis to determine whether Islandora can support some features. It would be great for all of Drupal if we make sure that the Drupal modules we use have support or transition to a new solution
This is related to Islandora defaults discussions.
Distributions could help with packaging and perception problems around what Islandora 8 can do, and offer a better starting point.

What are the other distributions?

IR
cultural heritage
We want different types of solutions: newspapers, oral histories, etc.
It can become difficult to have different kinds of functionality (digital archives and IR) in the same Islandora
digital scholarship as a third kind of distribution -- the ability to create/curate an exhibit of a digital project or of works in repository
There have been requests for exhibits module in Islandora or other kinds of storytelling devices.
Desire to keep ability to have all types of content in one system
Question of whether a return to solution packs model would meet some of these needs. That is difficult due to some Drupal issues.

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