The 2014 LITA Forum took place in Albuquerque, NM the first week of November. I had the opportunity to present on Islandora and what we accomplished with the Detroit Public Library Digital Collections site that we built.
Presentation
The slides for the presentation are available on SlideShare and on ALA Connect.
At the beginning of my presentation I took some time to answer the question, "Why use a DAMS?" instead of building an image gallery on your website or using a web service. (We will have a blog post up next week expanding on this topic.)
About half the audience had heard of Islandora, but only a few were using it in their libraries. Most of them did not know the details about what Islandora is and what it can do. I gave an overview of the technologies that are behind Islandora Drupal, Fedora, and Solr and emphasized the open source benefits of all this software.
After the presentation a number of people approached me with questions about Islandora and Drupal, which I was happy to answer. I'm always eager to discuss what people are doing with these tools and how we might be able to help.
Some of the comments I received about the DPL Digital Collections site were that I illuminated the possibilities of what a library can accomplish with Islandora and that they never knew that Islandora and Drupal could make such a compelling website.
Other attendees let me know that they admired the fact that we put our code back out into the world through GitHub and that we contribute modules like Islandora Entity Bridge, back to the community.?The spirit of open source is alive and well at Cherry Hill.