Augsburg University
The Augsburg University Archives went live June 1, 2018. The site includes photographs, alumni magazines, yearbooks, campus histories, course catalogs, newspapers, special collections, and Folkebladet. Folkebladet is a Norwegian language newspaper published at Augsburg University that ran from 1877-1952. It is available in Norwegian and is full text searchable online.
“Augsburg University is excited to join other Minnesota institutions that are using Islandora through PALS. We have been CONTENTdm® users for over a decade, and our digital collections have grown to more than 2,700 digital objects. This year, we had the opportunity to re-evaluate our collections, and we chose to migrate our holdings to Islandora. In addition to the technical support provided by PALS, we chose Islandora for its customizability, its search interface and its capacity for user-submitted content. We are excited to migrate our collections by June 2018 so that Augsburg has a fantastic platform ready for our sesquicentennial celebration in 2019,” Stewart Van Cleve, Digital Archives and Research Services Librarian, Augsburg University.
Please explore Augsburg University’s archives. The site includes oral histories and the Pan-Afrikan Collection, documenting Black life at Augsburg from 1987-2006.
Bethany Lutheran College
PALS began working with staff at Bethany Lutheran College in January 2017. Library staff members at BLC explored several digital asset management options, and “Islandora rose to the top with the most potential for versatility and ease of use,” Alyssa K. Inniger, Director of Library Services, Bethany Lutheran College.
PALS first loaded panoramic style photographs of the BLC student body and faculty that dated back to 1933. These images are part of the All Campus Photos and with other collections of photographs, yearbooks, and The Bethany Scroll newsletter provide an invaluable glimpse at BLC’s past. Staff at BLC were particularly excited to make Choir Recordings available.
“These recordings have been requested by alumni since before Bethany Lutheran College launched Islandora, so they are highly anticipated and are expected to receive enormous interaction. When testing the files on the development site, Archivist Erling Teigen said he was excited to get home and really turn up the volume! The collection will be a wonderful addition to the digital archive,” Alyssa K. Inniger, Director of Library Services, Bethany Lutheran College.
BLC continues to actively add material such as photographs, scrapbooks, and newspapers.
The College of St. Scholastica
PALS worked with staff at The College of St. Scholastica to build their repository, The Quarry, which includes a wide variety of materials. This includes photographs, college governance documents, college life photographs, and publications from 1903 to the present.
Concordia St. Paul University
Please explore the Concordia St. Paul Library & Archives Digital Collections. Material includes yearbooks, newspapers, and literary journals. Yearbooks go back as far as 1920, and newspapers go from 1944-2021.
Luther College
Luther College staff worked with PALS to load several publications for their repository. These are the faculty journal Agora, the campus newspaper, College Chips and yearbook, The Pioneer. Additionally, staff at Luther are incorporating Islandora into their records management practices. These records include correspondence, meeting minutes, and similar material. For more information on the policies, see slides from a presentation by Hayley Jackson at the 2018 Islandora Workday held at Luther.
Minnesota State University, Mankato
Minnesota State University, Mankato’s digital archives are available on ARCH.
PALS’ partnership with Minnesota State Mankato began with the migration of 7,000 plus photographs from CONTENTdm® to Islandora. When that finished, PALS loaded Minnesota State Mankato’s newspapers into Islandora. Work continues on photographs, newspapers, yearbooks and video.
The first video collection was Vikings Stories and proved Islandora’s flexibility and ability to meet local needs. 2015 was the 50th Anniversary of the Minnesota Vikings training camp, which took place at Minnesota State Mankato. The University had a partnership with the Blue Earth County Historical Society and wanted to document training camp by interviewing fans and players on video. Minnesota State Mankato asked PALS if it would be possible to do this on Islandora. Within a few days PALS had set up a collection and Minnesota State Mankato staff and student workers were able to record 147 videos during camp. They used an “iPad on a stick” (monopod) and recorded interviews of fans. Within 72 hours of making a video, they were able to have it available online.
This experience enabled library staff and student workers at Minnesota State Mankato to do the same for homecoming. The collection is titled Homecoming Stories, 2015.
PALS also developed features with Minnesota State Mankato that are now available for all our sites: social media sharing, My Favorites bookmarking, collection browse and statistics. For statistics, PALS uses the open source tool Matomo, previously marketed as Piwik. Matomo is similar to Google Analytics but is open source.
See the following articles for some additions made in 2018 to Minnesota State Mankato’s digital repository:
- Rare Audio of 1961 Martin Luther King Jr. Speech in Mankato Added to University Archives
- University Archives Completes Digitization Project of Student Newspaper
Minnesota Water Research Digital Library
In May 2018, PALS and the Minnesota Water Research Digital Library (MnWRL) launched their digital repository.
“PALS offered us a cost-effective approach to modernizing the user experience for MnWRL as well as the ability to make future changes and additions seamlessly at reasonable cost. Islandora not only provided a new user interface that is visually stimulating, it also allowed us to develop quick one-click access points to topical areas within the library. We also wanted to provide citations in different formats as an additional benefit to researchers using MnWRL,” Steve Roos, Minnesota Water Research Digital Library.
Read the following article to learn more about the project. It discusses how PALS developed topical access points and reveals other aspects that led to a successful launch.
“Regardless of the quality and capability of the software package embodied in Islandora the real key to success in a project is the dedication of the team we got to work with. The staff at PALS provided the skills, attention, and flexibility necessary to complete this complex project on time,” Steve Roos, Minnesota Water Research Digital Library.
Northwestern Health Sciences University
PALS began working with Northwestern Health Sciences University in January 2018. The first project consisted of loading numerous photographs which depict college life, events, faculty, administrators, students, marketing material, and photographs from the University’s earlier years. A collection of videos is also available. Material continues to be loaded into the repository.
Susan Vossberg, Technical Services Librarian, describes why they chose Islandora and PALS.
“Choosing Islandora was an easy decision to make. The top-selling points for us were PALS reputation in the library community, the fact that we would have local support both from PALS and other Islandora users, and that the system was affordable and a good value. Support from PALS staff was excellent before and during the process of building our site. They listened to what we wanted and worked with us to create a system that worked best for us, and provided ideas when we weren’t sure what do to. They also provided all of the education we needed to be able to work confidently once our system launched. Their support center responds quickly to our needs, and everyone that we’ve dealt with are friendly, supportive and professional.”
Opendora
Opendora, developed by PALS, is a digital archive for open educational resources that serves as a central repository for Minnesota State faculty and librarians to leverage licensed open educational resources (OER) with the ability to access, load, and share material. Opendora allows the storage of or linking to, course content including textbooks, lecture notes, syllabi, reading lists, and videos. To learn more, watch what is Opendora?
Benefits of Opendora:
- Accessible from the Minnesota State library system or any internet-connected device
- Single sign-on from D2L Brightspace
- Supports any file format
- Content is fully searchable
- Users can restrict access to content such as test banks
Southwest Minnesota State University
Southwest Minnesota State University worked with PALS on a beta project to test Islandora’s viability in 2012.
During the beta project, SMSU digitized their alumni newsletter, Focus, with the goal of gaining support to continue the project with administrators and possibly additional funding. In choosing Focus, staff at SMSU hoped to build a partnership with the SMSU Foundation. Their collection choice resonated with the SMSU Foundation and they received funding for five years.
“We opted to start by digitizing our university’s alumni news magazine. This was an ideal publication to begin our initiative with as it reaches a wide audience, contains valuable information on many aspects of our university, and has been consistently published since 1980. I worked with our University Foundation office to secure grant funding to get the initiative off the ground and continue communication with our Alumni Director on ways to promote and support the digital archives,” Pam Gladis, University Librarian, Southwest Minnesota State University.
Explore SMSU’s archives including collections of news articles, academic catalogs, college founding documents, Southwestern Symposium oral histories, and the alumni magazine, Focus.
Pam Gladis leads the project with assistance from library technicians and occasionally student interns.
St. Cloud Technical & Community College
The original goal for St. Cloud Technical & Community College staff was to load their accreditation materials so they would be easily accessible when needed. They also wanted to load a wide variety of materials in several formats such as photographs, college videos, college catalogs, master facilities plans, and college governance documents. The library did not have an archive of historical materials before working with PALS, so staff at SCTCC consider the project a huge success, enabling them to fill an important need for the college.
“We love it (Islandora) and firmly believe it will be a very important resource for the campus in the years to come. We are capturing a lot of history of the campus and our community that could have otherwise been lost,” Vi Bergquist, Chief Information Officer, Vice President of Information Technology Services, St. Cloud Technical & Community College.