UWDC Migration – Improving Access!
UW-Madison Libraries Digital Collections (UWDC) are excited to announce their collections discovery experience has been fully integrated into the Libraries’ Coordinated Discovery Platform. This move ensures a more consistent and efficient user experience while also allowing UWDC to manage its resources responsibly for the long term.
Coordinated discovery presents each distinct resource category – digitized collections, databases, articles, the library catalog – in a search interface optimized for that type of resource. The interfaces are coordinated with easy navigation between categories with suggestions for additional resources in other categories relevant to the patron’s search.
By moving the contextual landing (i.e., “about”) pages for their collections away from a separate WordPress instance into the Libraries’ Coordinated Discovery Platform, the Digital Collections experience has simultaneously become more scalable, flexible, and consistent.
Separating the collections information into discrete components allows UWDC to build new collections “pages” using standard templates efficiently. This treatment of each collection “page” as its own set of discrete components will enable them to easily adapt the collections experience to different devices, contexts, and users’ needs while preparing UWDC for future enhancements and new technologies.
Additionally, by maintaining the collection information in the Libraries’ content repository, it can be managed over the long term using the same techniques and workflows they use for other digital content.
Since the integration, users will notice a more consistent experience as they navigate the collections and digital content. That’s because each collection is described using the same categories and terms as collection items. Users may now retrieve the collections themselves in response to their queries, which provides further exploration paths. They can also learn about the collections without having to leave the discovery session for an external site.
The decision to move the contextual pages into the Coordinated Discovery Platform began with an extensive conversation about what a collection is and what isn’t. The UW-Madison Digital Collections Center (UWDCC) eventually settled on two simple parameters: 1) if the context is needed to explain why certain items are grouped, then it needs a landing page, and 2) if it needs a landing page, it’s a collection. Most items in UWDC belong to some broader contextual collection, but not all items.
Two hundred seventy-six collections were identified for migration. The first step was to turn the WordPress pages into collection objects. The distinct components of each collection’s web page – context, contents, copyright information, banner image, etc. – were divided into separate units within their repository, along with a “catalog record” for each. David Lee and Jessie Nemec, both senior web developers, assisted the UWDCC team in conceptualizing what would eventually be plugged into the Coordinated Discovery Platform designs.
They created a list of all the collections in a master spreadsheet, which the UWDCC team used to begin building collection objects. Jesse Henderson, Digital Library Services Planning & Production Manager, recreated each HTML document for the collections, which entailed reviewing every link and image used within a page or banner and cleaning up how WordPress uses HTML mark-up. Karen Rattunde gave each collection a descriptive record, Digital Metadata Strategist, then reviewed by Betsy Robbins, Sr. Academic Librarian.
Peter Gorman, Assistant Director for Digital Library and Preservation Strategy, created the models for representing collections as objects in the repository and updated older permalinks to their new location as items were moved over. Scripts that would validate both the HTML documents and the descriptive records were created by Scott Prater, Digital Library Architect, before the collections were moved to a test environment.
This integration is just one milestone of many as UWDC continues to migrate its complete digital collections assets. Their first batch of content was successfully migrated into the Coordinated Discovery Platform in January 2018. By May 2020, and six migrations later, UWDC achieved moving all of the multimedia content of their legacy infrastructure – one month ahead of schedule!
Their attention is now focused on the more text-heavy collections. While this involves even more hands-on review work, the UWDC team is looking forward to developing newer and more efficient workflows in addition to the opportunity to clean up data and files as they work through the files.
UW-Madison Libraries Digital Collections invites you to check out the new collections discovery experience and hopes you have fun exploring the many digital collections the Libraries have to offer!
~Special thanks to Bruce Barton, Peter Gorman, and Jesse Henderson for providing the content of this story~