Formal migration of content from our legacy Digital.Grinnell platform in Islandora, to Alma-Digital was “completed” on about March 19, 2025. The configuration and infrastructure used during migration is still viable, but not optimal for bulk import of NEW content. In this blog post I hope to capture some of the past, and our vision for the immediate future in terms of Alma-D configuration and bulk import.

The Past - Migration

Migration from Islandora to Alma-D involved a mix of workflow procedures and (mostly) Python scripts and apps aimed at exporting MODS and digital content from our Islandora instance of Digital.Grinnell (currently residing at https://legacy-dg.grinnell.edu) and importing it into Alma-Digital and a new qualified DC record profile.

DigitalGrinnell Qualified DC Import Profile

The migration import profile mentioned above was named DigitalGrinnell Qualified DC Import Profile; it was basically a modified (augmented) copy of the dcap01 profile provided by Alma. In fact, that profile still has an internal name of dcap01. Since it is NOT possible to “copy” or “duplicate” an Alma import profile, we have decided to reuse dcap01 and give a new name of NEW DG Qualified DC Import Profile while removing some of the migration cruft so that the profile is more sensible for import (not migration) of new digital objects.

Before making modifications to dcap01, we felt compelled to capture the migration version of the profile for eternity, so here it is in a series of configuration screen grabs…

DigitalGrinnell Qualified DC

This is the qualified DC metadata schema that was used for migration. As mentioned, it was derived from the dcap01 profile and will keep that internal name going forward. It’s name, DigitalGrinnell Qualified DC will also remain the same going forward, but some of the migration-specific fields/columns will be dropped.