Going forward, and with thanks to the Repository team here at BPL, we’ll be sharing some statistics on new collections being shared for the first time on DigitalCommonwealth.org. Below is our first update, for March 2025.
Hosted collections added:
Boston Public Library:
The Boston Traveler (1,776 items; issues of the daily newspaper from 1925-1931)
In order to better support the ever-growing collections of digitized content from Digital Commonwealth member institutions, developers in the Boston Public Library’s Digital Services team have been building the next generation of the library’s digital asset management system. This new system, built entirely on open-source software, uses cloud storage for file management, allowing the repository to potentially grow exponentially, without the constraints of locally-managed servers and storage devices.
This new system is a suite of applications, APIs, and services that are collectively known as “DC3,” since this is the third version of the asset management system used to support preservation and dissemination of digitized primary source materials. (Click here for an overview of the previous version.)
The heart of the new system is an application called Curator, which is responsible for managing all of the descriptive, administrative, and technical metadata for objects and files in the repository. Curator provides an application programming interface (API) to support ingesting new items into the repository or making changes to existing items. Backed by a relational database, the Curator data model supports a wide variety of content types, as well as rich descriptive metadata for ingested items conforming to the Digital Commonwealth metadata application profile, which is based on the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) created by the Library of Congress. This system provides improved data validation and authority control, making better use of controlled vocabularies and thesauri offered by the Library of Congress and the Getty Research Institute.
Curator interacts with a number of other applications in the DC3 ecosystem, including:
AVI Processor – analyzes ingested files to extract technical metadata and creates derivative files used for viewing and downloading.
BPLDC Authority API – supports querying a variety of controlled data sources (such as LC, Getty, and GeoNames) for descriptive metadata fields including subjects, locations, genres, languages, resource types, names, etc.
Canataloupe – provides high-resolution images and deep zooming functionality for the DC user interface via the IIIF Image API.
Solr – supports indexing and retrieval of metadata and full-text content; powers the search features for the DC user interface.
In addition to the increased capacity (and decreased maintenance) provided by moving storage infrastructure to the cloud, this system provides a number of advantages. The relational data model used by Curator supports the ability to make updates to existing metadata much more efficiently. By spreading functionality over a variety of applications, the system is more fault-tolerant overall, and components can be re-engineered without the need for a complete overhaul of the entire system. And because this system uses more widely-adopted technologies and components, it will be easier to maintain and on-board new developers in the future.
All components of the DC3 system are built on freely-available open-source software. ARK-manager, AVI Processor, and BPLDC Authority API are custom-built applications created and maintained by BPL Digital Services – like Curator, code for many of these projects is available on GitHub.
Please contact us with any questions, comments, or concerns.
Presenters: Bill Donovan and Jack Kearney, Boston College
Postcard image of the Boston College Bell Tower, ca. 1930-1945. From the Tichnor Brothers Postcard Collection at the Boston Public Library.
Our presenters described the workflow followed to access records on an external hard drive included in the personal papers of Irish soprano and harpist Mary O’Hara, their first dive into the sea of digital preservation. They described how workflows start as baseline best practices. What happens when the unanticipated occurs? Hearing about the steps taken at Boston College to appraise, ingest and clear unanticipated hurdles along the way reinforced that processing plans/workflows are a starting point. What you find when you open the files can and will drive changes to workflows – sound familiar? Tags: Writeblocker, UNIX, 8.3 Constraint, Fixity (software), Identity Finder (software), XENA tool, Policy writing, FITS tool, JHOVE tool, LOCKSS, DP in a box, Digital Forensics.
Digital Commonwealth 2.0: It’s Alive!
Presenters: Steven Anderson and Eben English
Despite the migration to our new platform in Fedora and Hydra literally happening while we met, our intrepid presenters gave before & after comparisons of the repository website with its streamlined visual presentation and enhanced search capabilities. If you haven’t already, check it out!
Rapid Fire Inspiring Projects
Benjamin Sewall Blake jumping, ca. 1888. From the Francis Blake photographs at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Presenters: Christine Clayton, Worcester Art Museum (WAM); Abigail Cramer, Historic New England (HNE); Sean M. Fisher, Department of Conservation (DCR) and Recreation and Rebecca Kenney, Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA); Larissa Glasser, Arnold Arboretum Horticultural Library (AAHL); Nancy Heywood, Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS); Michael Lapides, New Bedford Whaling Museum; Sara Slymon, Turner Free Library
WOW! Our presenters offered up a smorgasbord of formats, collections and projects they undertook to make records available to their users. For some, their users were internal, like the WAM, which digitized exhibition catalogs, HNE digitized their collection of photographs by Nathaniel Stebbins, DCR and MWRA digitized 8800 images, the largest collection undertaken by Digital Commonwealth so far. AAHL digitized a collection of glass plate negatives…the results? Unanticipated revenue streams – from interior decorators, increased hits on websites, object provenance authentications, access to the identities of early American movers and shakers as reported in contemporary newspapers, accessible Town Reports and High School yearbooks. Several of these projects are still in the pipelines, so not yet searchable on the Digital Commonwealth website.
Submitted by guest reporter Elizabeth Cousins, First Parish in Brookline.
