How’s Your Migration Going? IUPUI edition

Chip Dye, Director of Information Technology at IUPUI’s University Library responds to our Partner Story questionnaire below. IUPUI’s Library has roughly 116 digital collections with 576000 objects totalling 2.2 TB of data. They use both Dublin Core and VRA Core (for their art collections) and align to DPLA standards.

Original Platform?
Content DM

New Platform?
Samvera/Hyrax

Is this the Platform you had originally planned to migrate to?
No – Originally planned to use Princeton’s Plum hydra head

If not, please elaborate on the reasons to pivot
Since Hyrax picked up great community support before we were ready to migrate to our Plum instance and since Hyrax has many of the features we were originally interested in, development efforts were redirected to creating a Hyrax based application

Broadly, how is your migration going?
Slower than we had hoped for

If your migration is not going, please elaborate on the reasons it has not moved forward
It is moving forward, but the ever-changing nature of the platform and tools has required us to take several steps back to stay in step with the community

What have been the biggest obstacles?
As mentioned above we often create work that has to be redone as we migrate to new versions/gems/tools from the community

What’s gone well?
We have learned a lot of ruby, rails, fedora, agile/scrum development, and partnering with other institutions. Also, use of the tools from the Bridge2Hyku community (HyBridge gem and CDM Bridge application) has been very helpful

What lessons have you learned?
Try to be a little more patient with the pace of community efforts and look for ways to work on areas that won’t require as much “redo” effort as the platform changes

What customizations to the platform have you had to do?
User interfaces, CAS integration, metadata work, workflows, file manager, structure manager

What feature are you most excited about having?
The ability to make changes when necessary to support our projects that you can’t get when using a vendor-based application that gives you little control of changes

What advice would you share with those currently considering or beginning a migration?
Try to avoid the pressure of jumping too far ahead of the community in the name of getting an application or project to production

Want to see the other B2H Partner’s migration questionnaires?
Go to our Migration Stories Page