This is the third in a series of monthly updates on the Fedora Migration Paths and Tools project – please see last month’s post for a summary of the work completed up to that point. This project has been generously funded by the IMLS.
The Principal Investigator, David Wilcox, participated in a presentation for CNI that also included Robin Ruggaber from the University of Virginia pilot and Amy Blau from the Whitman College pilot. This was a great opportunity to communicate progress on the grant work so far to a broader audience. The recording is now available on Vimeo.
The Whitman College team has largely completed their metadata remediation and mapping work. This work is being documented in terms of process, resources, decisions made, and lessons learned, and will be shared with the community as part of the grant toolkit. Meanwhile, Born Digital has nearly completed work on the new Islandora 8 theme, and the grant team is just about ready to begin conducting test migrations with sample content.
The University of Virginia team conducted a detailed investigation of the errors that were encountered during migration testing. These errors were revealed to be linked to objects in the legacy Fedora 3 repository that were missing datastreams, which caused the migration utility to skip them. The team determined that these objects were related to content that had already been migrated to newer systems, so they could be safely left behind during the migration. However, had the objects still been relevant from a preservation perspective, the team was prepared to create a script to repair the objects by removing references to missing datastreams in order to migrate what remained.
December is a short month due to the upcoming holidays, but the Whitman team plans to complete their metadata work and review the results of initial test migrations, while the University of Virginia team plans to complete the migration of working content and index these resources into the new Fedora 6 installation.
Stay tuned for further updates next month!