Digital.Grinnell
Call it The GCDLADB if you like.
How to Add a Collection to Digital.Grinnell 4 min read Jun 25, 2020 | Updated: Sep 11, 2023 13:54
So, you want to add a new collection or sub-collection (they are really the same thing) to Digital.Grinnell, eh? It’s easy, but there are some things to consider before I show you how. Collection Guidelines There are no “formal” guidelines for the creation of a collection or sub-collection in Digital.Grinnell, but I can think of a couple “informal” things to consider. Are there or will there ever be enough objects, old and/or new, with something in common to warrant a new collection? ...
Updating Digital.Grinnell (in Islandora) One More Time 7 min read Jan 19, 2023 | Updated: Jan 20, 2023 22:33
Digital.Grinnell’s Islandora lifespan will most likely come to an end this year, or at least in the early part 2024. So, I’m adopting a new, lean and mean process for updating it from this point forward. Basically the process will involve backing up the code that’s already in place, then using drush up to upgrade the Drupal modules and core if necessary. That process on January 19, 2023, went something like this… vSphere Snapshot In case of catastrophic failure I first elected to open my VPN then a window into VMware® vSphere. ...
Creating a CollectionBuilder-CSV Instance from Our Migration Collection 10 min read Nov 28, 2022
This post is essentially a CollectionBuilder-CSV follow-up to Creating a Migration Collection, intended to document the path I’ve taken and the decisions I made when creating a first cut of Digital.Grinnell content using the aformentioned CollectionBuilder-CSV. CB-CSV_DG-01 With few notable exceptions, everything mentioned below will be visible in a new public GitHub repo at Digital-Grinnell/CB-CSV_DG-01. Corresponding Google Sheet One of the exceptions: the project’s metadata CSV in a time-stamped tab at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ic4PxHDbuzDrmf4YtauhC4vEQJxt3QSH8bYfLBCM3Gc/. Other worksheets/tabs in the Google Sheet contain: Sheet 1 = the initial imported demo data from the CollectionBuilder-CSV Metadata Template ...
Creating a Migration Collection 22 min read Oct 12, 2022
As we continue to look at potential migration paths for our Digital.Grinnell (DG) content, it’s become apparent that it would be nice to have a small “test” or “migration” collection of objects to play with. The collection should have a small, but diverse, set of objects covering all of the popular content, or CModel, types that we currently have in DG. Since Slack now imposes a 90-day lifespan for posts (we are using only free-tier Slack services at this time) I thought I had better create this blog post to capture key parts of a relevant Slack conversation… ...
Rebuilding ISLE for Digital.Grinnell 2 min read Jun 23, 2022 | Updated: Jan 20, 2023 22:26 Superseded by posts/137-updating-digital.grinnell-one-more-time.md
This blog post will be used to chronicle a process I’m using to rebuild Digital.Grinnell in Legacy Islandora using ISLE. This process was triggered by ITS’ intent to move DG’s FEDORA repository to a new server. That new server is currently mounted on node DGDockerX, my staging server, as /mnt/datastage and it contains a copy of DG’s production FEDORA repository made on or about June 15, 2020. PORTABLE-DG For starters I’m going be doing lots of “local” ISLE work up-front so I’m creating a USB drive backup/copy of /mnt/datastage. ...
New Oral History Transcription Workflow 15 min read Mar 24, 2022
Digital.Grinnell features a fair number of transcribed digital oral histories. Most are interviews conducted with Grinnelleans as they return to campus annually for alumni Reunion or Grinnell’s Multicultural Reunion. What follows is largely sharable “public” content lifted from a “private” GitHub repository at https://github.com/McFateM/OHScribe, the README.md and WORKFLOW.md files in particular. OHScribe! https://ohscribe.us.reclaim.cloud/ Note: This link is the new production home for OHScribe! as of March 2022. It is now hosted on Reclaim Cloud. The old address, https://ohscribe.grinnell.edu, is no longer in service. ...
Book Ingest in Digital.Grinnell 3 min read Nov 30, 2020 | Updated: Feb 5, 2021 16:12
It’s high-time this was posted to my blog, but the canonical copy of this document can be found in smb://Storage/LIBRARY/mcfatem/DG-Book-Ingest-Workflow.md. Valid Book Datastream Structure I want to begin here by showing what I see as a “proper” working book datastream structure in Digital.Grinnell. The image below is a screen grab of the datastreams from the Grinnell College Yearbook 1961, DG object grinnell:23749: Figure 1 · Valid Book Datastreams Creating a Valid Book Structure One of the biggest problems I have encountered with ingest of books is uploading very large multi-page PDFs. ...
Oral History Transcription Workflow 14 min read Jun 1, 2020 Superseded by posts/121-new-oral-history-transcription-workflow.md
Digital.Grinnell features a fair number of transcribed digital oral histories. Most are interviews conducted with Grinnelleans as they return to campus annualy for alumni Reunion or Grinnell’s Multicultural Reunion. What follows is largely sharable “public” content lifted from a “private” GitHub repository at https://github.com/McFateM/OHScribe, the README.md and WORKFLOW.md files in particular. OHScribe! https://ohscribe.grinnell.edu Note: This link was disabled in the spring of 2020, but is working again as of July 1, 2020, on host DGDocker3. This is a Python 3 and Flask web application designed to transform oral history transcripts, presumably created using InqScribe, into XML suitable for ingest into the Islandora Oral Histories Solution Pack to populate a TRANSCRIPT datastream and its derivatives. ...
Digital.Grinnell Custom MODS Display 2 min read May 28, 2020
Digital.Grinnell has seen a lot of customization over the years, and quite a bit of it relates to how an object’s metadata, especially its MODS metadata, is displayed. My aim for the past couple of years has been to remove as much customization as possible, but I’ve found it difficult to remove features of our MODS display because those features seem to be rather popular. This is particulary true of our compound object display. Custom Compound/Child MODS Display At present, May 28, 2020, the MODS display for a typical compound/child object in Digital. ...
Updating DG's Collection Views 3 min read Mar 17, 2020
Digital.Grinnell employs a custom-built Drupal “view” we call the dg7 Collection View; it’s part of the code in our custom dg7 module where all of Digital.Grinnell’s hook implementations are also defined. Experience leads me to beleive that keeping a complex Drupal view in code is prudent, but overriding that code with a database copy of the view helps tremendously in terms of system performance. So, I recommend keeping the view code in the module, but that means that when significant changes are made, like the addition of a new colleciton, the code should be updated in the database to speed things up. ...