No, you didn’t miss a post– it’s been awhile since we have updated the site! Lots has been happening, here’s the latest on the project:

• We reached a number of milestones in early January and wrapped up some of the information-gathering exercises requested by Common Media (CM):
  • the User Stories Roadmap
  • a Technical Survey, which outlines the general scope of the IT landscape at each school
  • the Ingest/Workflow Survey, with samples of collection assets and related metadata for review by CM
• At our face to face meeting with CM on January 15, we discussed the first outcomes of data analysis created from our initial collections, metadata and technical information-gathering efforts, along with some initial scenarios on what the installation of Islandora might look like as a shared application. It was pretty exciting to see some of our ideas and conversations take shape.
• Out of this meeting, we determined that we needed to share information about user access categories. In other words, who are our users? How might they use the repository? What kinds of categories of access are needed? And how do these categories align (or not) among the 3C? We created an Access Survey which CM will review and merge into the other streams of data and 3C information as they proceed with their report.
• CM is currently closely examining all of the collected metadata and collections information (from both the Metadata Survey and Ingest/Workflow Survey) from 3C so it can be wrapped into the final report.
• After struggling for weeks on the Governance Roadmap, the 3C team, in consultation with CM, came to the realization that it’s difficult to make and write up governance decisions when you aren’t entirely sure what it is that needs to be governed (in other words, there’s no there there!). So we’ve decided to roll this important work into the report-writing phase over the next two months.
• And speaking of the final report: from here on in our work shifts more to an iterative process with CM as the report begins to be written, with less emphasis on surveys and data collection.

On January 25, Members of the 3C team and staff from CM attended a gathering at Williams College in the beautiful new Sawyer Library. Members of the Islandora Consortial Group (ICG), along with representatives from Barnard and Wesleyan, met to discuss ways in which the combined colleges might work together to collaboratively develop functionality for Islandora. It was a wonderful day and we’re all looking forward to continuing the conversation.