The CTDA is a digital archive program hosted by the University of Connecticut Library in collaboration with the Connecticut State Library. It offers long-term preservation services for digital content from Connecticut non-profits. Services include technical infrastructure, support, governance, education and contributing content to the Digital Public Library of America and ResearchIT. Participation is open to organizations like libraries, historical societies, and museums. Governance is collaborative rather than directive. The CTDA provides training and documentation on adding and managing content. It works to ensure stable infrastructure through software updates, server maintenance, and new feature development. Recent updates include migrating websites to Drupal and developing new tools for batch ingest, geospatial content, and newspaper pages. Plans for the

1. CTDigital Archive
Brown Bag
October 7, 2016

2. What is the CTDA?
The CTDA is a program hosted by the University of
Connecticut Library in collaboration with the Connecticut
State Library.
It is a state wide program that offers long-term
preservation services for Connecticut based non-profit
institutions.
Services include:
• Technical infrastructure
• End user/ participant support
• Governance
• Education/ training
• State of Connecticut DPLA Service Hub
• State of Connecticut ResearchIT Content Contributor
• Accessible documentation such as participant
resources, code repositories, statistics, …

3. Participation rather
than membership
Participants include:
• UConn
• Connecticut State Library
• Connecticut Historical Society
• Avon Public Library
• Groton Public Library
• American School for the Deaf
• Trinity College
• Mystic Seaport
• Hartford Public Library/ Hartford History
Center
• Bridgeport History Center
• Barnum Museum
• And so many more…..

4. Collaborative Governance rather
than directive charge
Governance includes:
• Advisory Committee: comprised of 8-12
members of colleagues and peers from the
cultural heritage, digital preservation, and
academic communities in CT.
http:/ / collections.ctdigitalarchive.org/ advi
sory-committee
• Technical Roadmap discussion: open
discussion held in person and virtually once
a month on how to chart the short and long
term technical infrastructure of the CTDA.
http:/ / collections.ctdigitalarchive.org/ tech
nical-roadmap
• CTDA Tech Meeting: CTDA and ITS staff
meet to discuss CTDA infrastructure such as
migration, storage growth needs or
boosting performance

5. Education/ Training
CTDA offers in person and virtual workshops,
how-to documents, and online videos on:
• How to add and manage content
• Object modeling
• Describing content
• Cleaning up messy data
• Creating records for batch import
• New functionality
CTDA tracks inquiries from participants and
users through HelpSpot.

6. Infrastructure
CTDA works with a vendor and our own ITS
staff to ensure that participants can add and
manage content. Development is tracked with
Trello and HelpSpot.
CTDA has:
• Development sprints: used to build new
features not offered as part of the current
open source systems. Examples include the
data harvester, external batch ingest
service, themes, or new tools
• Maintenance sprints: CTDA is on a quarterly
schedule to update identified components
that range from software to patches to
servers

7. What’s New?
We just finished a maintenance sprint. What did we do?
• Brought all Islandora and Drupal sites to “head”
• Completed work on the external batch ingest service for
a 1st test run
• Investigated how to update the eRegulations automated
workflow
• Developed test scenarios for the external batch ingest
service
• Re-ran the index in the background
• Completed the migration of the CTDA main website from
the Library’s hosted WordPress site to the Drupal site
• Updated our core library with these new tools
• GIS tool developed by DGI to allow users to download the
original resource and an associated zip file for all
cartographic material
• Ordered newspaper batch import developed by DGI to
allow users to batch import multiple newspaper issues and
pages at the same time
• On this day developed by Mark Jordan displays resources
that occurred on this day
• Batch derivative generation developed Daniel Aitken to
allow only an administrator to regenerate DC descriptions.

8. What’s on the
horizon?
• Rethinking infrastructure
• Migrating from Fedora 3 to 4
• Migrating from Drupal 7 to 8
• Migrating from Islandora 7.x.1to 7.x.2
• Hiring a repository analysist
• Enhancing users’ experience
• Looking at new ways to share and re-use
content
• Rethinking our data harvester

9. Questions?
ctda@uconn.edu