Most researchers wouldn’t appreciate being called Mr. Potato Head. UPEI’s University Librarian Mark Leggott is not most researchers.
Dozens of Mr. Potato Head dolls line the windowsill of Leggott’s office in UPEI’s Robertson Library. One is dressed as the arch-villain of the Star Wars movies (Darth Tater); another wears Indiana Jones’ trademark hat and leather jacket (Taters of the Lost Ark). Others are more obscure, such as the replica of the original Mr. Potato Head, created to mark the toy’s 50th anniversary.
“In a way, Mr. Potato Head is a perfect metaphor for open-source software,” says Leggott with a grin. “One team builds the core software, then releases it to the world, asking: what could you stick in this thing to make it better?”
Leggott’s potato is Islandora: an open-source software platform to manage and archive large amounts of digital data, no matter what the format. Islandora brings together a number of other open-source programs, most notably Fedora and Drupal.
“Drupal is the front end,” explains Leggott. “It’s a content management system that’s quickly growing in popularity as a web tool. The White House’s website is created using Drupal, as is UPEI’s. Fedora is the repository for the data, and in a sense is the most important part. To be a useful, sustainable archiving tool, it must be secure, stable, and migratable. Fedora is all of that.”
Islandora was born two years ago when Leggott was building UPEI’s Virtual Research Environments, or VREs. Each VRE allows research teams to collaborate, communicate, and manage and archive their work in a secure environment.
“We ended up using the same tool to manage the University’s digital collections,” says Leggott. Eventually, Islandora would be used to create other projects such as IslandLives, which archives community and church histories from around Prince Edward Island, and IslandScholar, a digital repository for scholarly publications from the UPEI community.
As open-source software, Islandora is freely available for download. Later this year, Leggott will use Atlantic Innovation Funds, announced recently, to create a spinoff company to service Islandora users, and create software bundles, or “sprouts,” to complement the core program for specific needs.
Islandora is catching the attention of researchers and universities around the world. The University of New Brunswick and University College Dublin have installed Islandora to manage and archive some of their data; other institutions are sure to follow.
