Our pandemic year may have shuttered our offices on Washington Square and temporarily hindered our physical movements, but our digital collections never seem to stay put in one place for long. Whether they’re growing, or moving to revamped websites, or packing up and resettling in new server rooms, the material we publish and present to our research communities can be as migratory as a salmon or a sea turtle.
That’s why it’s exciting to announce a big migration win to kick off Spring! DLTS successfully moved over 200 books from the original Ancient World Digital Library (AWDL) site to the new site. This process took several attempts over a period of years to make it happen. While many of the books from the original site were digitized by our in-house lab, many were scanned by the Internet Archive using a workflow that we didn’t use for any other collection. They were also published boutique-style, before we had established a system for publishing books.
Migrations were attempted in the past, with various strategies such as:
- Converting the content in Drupal from one version to another – but we couldn’t use it, because the metadata and files wouldn’t map easily or cleanly into the new AWDL site and its viewer.
- Re-digitizing some of the books to achieve a jump in image quality (and to remove some of those infamous mass digitization thumbs) – but there were hundreds of books, and we were only able to get to a relative handful.
…and finally the one that was successful:
- Ingesting the content and shoehorning it into our workflow
- Publishing the content to our new site
- Ensuring that all of the books were present and accounted for, and communicating with ISAW to get their feedback and approval
- Setting up redirects from the books on the old site to their handles, ensuring that users who bookmarked the old versions could find their way to the new versions
Thank you to everyone who touched these books and made sure they moved safely into their new home! To see “Dendereh, 1898” the item in the picture above, click here.