Islandoracon

In October 2018, a grassroots organization called Otay Allies donated a large collection of letters collected from detainees held at the Otay Mesa Detention Center to San Diego State University. The University’s Institutional Repository became, to our knowledge, the first of its kind to create and maintain a digital collection that serves to share and make accessible the stories of hundreds of refugees from around the world in real time. This session presentation will discuss the changes, challenges, and opportunities encountered during the creation and management of the collection using Islandora.

It’s really tempting to “do Linked Data” by semantically modelling a domain for maximum meaning. But encoding names (or anything to do with people) can be really difficult. It’s easy to insert our own biases into our frameworks, which can result in a system that is harmful to individuals or groups. What structures in Drupal and RDF can we use to manage names in bibliographic or authority data without falling into these traps?
Suggested reading: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

Slides

True to its roots in a Land Grant University, the CTDA sees its mission is to educate its members about digital preservation and access beyond merely providing preservation services. Rather than imposing extensive rules and high barriers to participation, the CTDA works collaboratively with its members, who have highly variable knowledge and resources, to understand the principles of digital preservation in order to make good stewardship decisions about their digital assets. This means that their content is both preserved and useful in the networked world.
We don’t explicitly introduce preservation concepts as requirements for participation, but implicitly weave these principles into our training and tools. We will use examples of our activities and those of some of our members to illustrate how preservation principles are embodied in the work we all do, and how we listen to our members to develop tools and services that meet their use needs and the requirements of digital preservation and access.