Keep Calm and Migrate: How to survive a digital content migration
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Given as part of the panel, "Planning is Hard, Change is Harder: Migrating Digital Collections" at the PLAN Digitization Conference, Panama City Beach, August 13, 2015.
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Keep Calm and Migrate: How to survive a digital content migration
- 1. Click to edit Master title style • Click to edit Master text styles – Second level • Third level – Fourth level » Fifth level Keep Calm and Migrate: How to survive a digital content migration Krystal Thomas @kmthomas / #PLANDC15 August 13, 2015 PLAN Digitization Conference
- 2. Click to edit Master title style • Click to edit Master text styles – Second level • Third level – Fourth level » Fifth level Migration is an Opportunity – use it!
- 3. Click to edit Master title style • Click to edit Master text styles – Second level • Third level – Fourth level » Fifth level Digital Weeding – It’s a thing! • You don’t have to take it all with you! – Duplicate objects – Incomplete objects – Poorly imaged or described objects – Objects that belong in a different digital repository
- 4. Click to edit Master title style • Click to edit Master text styles – Second level • Third level – Fourth level » Fifth level So, Metadata…
- 5. Click to edit Master title style • Click to edit Master text styles – Second level • Third level – Fourth level » Fifth level Prepping for Migration: 5 Step Summary • Review your objects • Gather Information on past projects and decisions • Track all your decisions • Make a plan for during migration • Make a plan for after migration
- 6. Click to edit Master title style • Click to edit Master text styles – Second level • Third level – Fourth level » Fifth level The Actual Migration
- 7. Click to edit Master title style • Click to edit Master text styles – Second level • Third level – Fourth level » Fifth level Lots and Lots and Lots of Surprises • No matter how well you plan for it, migration have lots of surprises for you • Check and double check and triple check • It will be a long process and that is OK
- 8. Click to edit Master title style • Click to edit Master text styles – Second level • Third level – Fourth level » Fifth level Don’t be afraid to change the plan!
- 9. Click to edit Master title style • Click to edit Master text styles – Second level • Third level – Fourth level » Fifth level Life After Migration • Give yourself multiple finish lines – you need to celebrate! • Migration doesn’t mean new projects stop happening – this is a good thing! • If the plan changed, document and keep moving forward
- 10. Click to edit Master title style • Click to edit Master text styles – Second level • Third level – Fourth level » Fifth level Thank you! kmthomas06@fsu.edu Twitter: @kmthomas06 #PLANDC15
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon everyone! Introduce everyone I am going to start us off with a broad overview of migration – what to plan for before, during and after and draw on my experiences at FSU where we migrated from the DigiTool platform to Islandora – in that migration, we moved roughly 15,000 objects (photographs, books, PDF objects) – for the books, that was over 33,000 pages. So, a sizable migration. We were also in the unique position that much of the technical part of the migration would be handled by Florida Virtual Campus so that left myself and fellow team members free to do some major planning and work before and after the migration.
- Migration is first and foremost a fantastic time to take stock of your digital collections in general. What do you have? How well is it described? How well is it imaged? What gets used the most? What hasn’t been touched since the day you loaded it? At FSU, we were in a very odd place. DigiTool had not been well regulated – we did not have a standard for imaging or for metadata. Our organization of our digital collections was a mess as well. We took migration as a major opportunity to clean up our digital collections and put in place standards and policies so that moving forward, our digital collections would play nicely together, for both our benefit and our users’ Source: Timidmonster.com
- The first thing we noticed when we took stock of what we had in our system was that…we didn’t want to take it all with us. And, we didn’t have to! I know there is this desire to 1) digitize everything and 2) to keep everything once it is digitized but you don’t have to and also, you shouldn’t keep it all. Because of our unregulated system, we had some major problems with our objects so we were happy that the migration gave us an excuse to do some digital weeding and you probably will be too: Duplication – our biggest area of deletion and leaving behind. I also did weeding after migration in this category as well (Faculty portraits) Incomplete objects Poorly imaged objects Poorly described objects Objects that didn’t belong – IR materials intermixed with digital collections materials Our weeding had two paths: deletion OR download and store Track your decisions here; make sure if you are downloading to re-load at some point, that that is on a list and in priority order to help organize your work during and after migration. Image source: http://blog.smartpress.com/12-tips-to-spring-clean-your-digital-life
- Metadata is hard. No one’s will ever be perfect (though my metadata librarian will disagree with me). You could always add more; more access points! However, those access points aren’t helpful if they aren’t standardized across your system. Before a migration is a perfect time to ask yourself – is your metadata good? Good enough? If it needs some work, like ours did, you need to make a decision to fix things before or after the migration. The easiest way to make that decision is how friendly the system is to global change. Any metadata clean up will probably involve standardization of language and terms – that will be a lot easier to do if you have a global find and replace for your system. You can also decide to fix in between systems – sometimes, it’s easiest to just deal with the raw XML, be it Dublin Core, MODS, METS etc. – if this is a possible option for some of your materials, it will make your life easier. Also be aware that sometimes, these files are not “editable” in the next system. In Islandora, we can’t get at the METS stream easily so any changes have to be made outside of the system. Source for image: http://therealdeal.com/blog/2014/07/09/ellen-degeneres-rents-space-for-her-brand-how-to-tell-a-fixer-upper-from-a-flop-and-more/
- So, to summarize from the last two slides and then tack on a few other things – prep for your migration! Review your objects – as we saw on the last two slides, some weeding and metadata decisions now will affect your entire migration Gather info on past projects and decisions – things change, people leave – the person who did that digital collection 5 years ago might not be around to consult anymore – do you have documentation on the project? Maybe there is a reason for certain imaging and metadata decisions that will affect decisions you make based on your own review of materials Frustrated because you couldn’t find anything? Track your decisions! Make sure everything you decide is written down clearly and then put somewhere all can find it for future reference Make a plan for during and after migration – we’re going to discuss both of these in upcoming slides but make sure you think through the process and aftermath before you start – if nothing else, it’s a way to make sure your mind knows that planning the migration is only the first step, not the final.
- So as I mentioned we started, FSU didn’t have to do the actual migration ourselves; FLVC did the move of digital materials from one system to the other for us. I know Jamie will go into the nitty-gritty of what sort of work goes into that in her presentation next. What I can speak on, is what it is like to sort of be on the outskirts of your own migration Source: http://kjcomm.com/2013/02/5-important-technology-items-to-consider-when-moving-offices/
- So, I will tell you now, no matter how well you plan, there will be surprises in your migration. Coordinate and be in communication with the people involved in your migration. Be checking the new system as objects come into it, do quality control on objects coming in – are they complete, does the metadata match. Migration is not a point, click and wait project. For me, it was constantly checking and double checking objects as they came in for quality and correctness. There will be new issues – you will find material in your migration that you somehow missed in your planning review – that is OK. Run through your review steps with all new materials as well - no need to keep something just because it got moved because you missed it in your review. Migration takes a long time; take it collection by collection if that helps. Parsing the migration will keep you and your team sane. Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/06/27-surprised-cats-who-cant-believe-what-they-just-saw-photos_n_2421293.html
- As I mentioned as the last slide, things are going to happen. Don’t be afraid to change the plan for after migration to accommodate things that happen during the migration. Be flexible and stay on top of things – migration like I said is not point and click! Source: http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/p/keep-calm-we-have-a-change-of-plans/
- Migration is often a multi-stage process and you’ll want to say “yay! we’re done!” Are you done when everything is migrated or when everything is fixed in the new system? Give yourselves multiple finish lines with lots of small due dates along the way to celebrate - you’ll need them! Once you have materials into the new system, make sure you’re also working on new projects – work doesn’t stop because you’re moving house and this is a good thing. Once of the best things we did at FSU was make sure we had a new finished project ready to go into the FSUDL as soon as we made the new site public. This 1) kept us excited for the move because we would have something new to share as well and 2) Made sure we were using (and breaking) the new system. Things we learned loading and launching that new project went into things we were dealing with from migration and what we’d learned. Also, if the plan changed at any point, make sure that is also documented along side your planning and migration decisions. This is not a project you want to re-live any time soon and documenting everything means you shouldn’t need to. At FSU, we’re still very much in the life after migration stage. A lot of the work we planned on doing post-migration has been held up by some staffing changes as well as some development still needed in Islandora to help make those changes feasible. We have completely re-done one collection of Caribbean maps we chose to move with better images and updated metadata so that was one small finish line in migration for us. Source: https://www.utica.edu/student-blogs/pacing-yourself-near-the-finish-line/
- Thank you for listening and hopefully this overview helped in learning where to start thinking about migration planning and execution. Now Jamie will discuss the nuts and bolts of a migration.