Artstor

This is was a quite intimate meeting; in attendance:

Bill Ying, ARTStor (presenter)
Ray Lubinsky, University of Virginia
Linda Newman, University of Cincinnati
Cristian Ertmann-Christiansen, Royal Library of Denmark

Bill’s presentation was focused on encouraging greater cooperation between ARTStor’s SharedShelf platform and the Hydra partnership.

ARTStor is working on an API which was allow SharedShelf to present itself as a repository in the same was that Fedora does. Bill said that about 80% of the Fedora 3 API functionality was currently present; he is hoping to find some partnerships to help justify effort into going the rest of the way. Fedora 4 API functionality was mentioned; I don’t remember how firm that was at this point – that may be dependent on level of interest.

Bill offered a number of possible paths to cooperation, one of which was the idea of creating a Hydra head that uses SharedShelf instead of Fedora and ElasticSearch (their choice of indexing software) instead of Solr. Several people expressed doubts that this would be very feasible since Solr and Fedora are currently very fundamental to Blacklight/Hydra development.

Bill also noted that SharedShelf is very interested in IIIF and intends to expose that interface as a way of accessing image content from SharedShelf. He also was excited about the possibility of providing a “registry” of IIIF servers from partner institutions because currently these image servers were not easily discoverable. This is an interesting idea, although several people pointed out that the typical Hydra installation uses an image server as an adjunct to the discovery service provided through the Hydra application.

Bill expressed a desire for Shared Shelf to become part of the Hydra community. Discussion followed about what this might mean and how/if Shared Shelf would be able to give back to the Hydra community.

Workflow was discussed: exporting content from Shared Shelf to our repositories versus exporting content from our repositories to Shared Shelf. A third alternative, already supported by Shared Shelf although not yet with a Fedora institution, is to leave digital content physically stored in our repositories, but through a persistent URL, use Shared Shelf as a cataloging service that creates metadata that can be imported to replace/enhance the repository metadata. (In this case, the repository institution does not incur the same storage costs from ArtStor.)

Once a work is described in Shared Shelf, it can be published to DPLA (Bill said with institutional/local source branding).

Shared Shelf supports XML and OAI import and export. The cataloging service supports authority control/integration with the Getty vocabularies.

-- Ray Lubinsky (notetaker)