AGRICOLA (AGRICultural OnLine Access) is a primary public source for worldwide access to agricultural information. AGRICOLA is produced by the National Agricultural Library at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Built on the Islandora digital repository framework, it hosts 4.8 million digital objects. discoverygarden provided support to the project beginning in 2013. Since then, discoverygarden and staff from the National Agricultural Library have designed and built new enhancements for Islandora and collaborated on configurations to optimize the performance of the repository. The project resulted in a repository framework that provided additional input streams, reporting and management interfaces, and a more robust environment for managing AGRICOLA data. Charles Schoppet, IT Specialist at USDA, will join the webinar and provide an overview of National Agricultural Library, it’s users and the requirements that led to the Islandora Gsearcher Module.

1. ‘Highlighting the U.S. National
Agricultural Library’
Islandora Webinar
May 18, 2016
PLEASE MUTE YOUR MICROPHONE!

2. Introductions
Adam Smith
Sales and Marketing Associate

3. Welcome!
Agenda
• Islandora overview
• Introduction of guest speaker
• U.S. National Agricultural
Library
• Question period

4. The
Technology Islandora

5. The Technology
Presentation & Collaboration
Drupal is the leading open source
content management system with
over 30,000 user contributed
modules from almost 100,000 active
community members.
Drupal serves as the presentation
and collaboration layer in Islandora.
Islandora is a set of Drupal modules
which allow users to manage and
preserve digital assets.

6. The Technology
Search & Discovery
Solr powers some of the most
heavily-trafficked websites and
applications in the world.
Key features include:
● Full-text search
● Search faceting & filtering
● Highly scalable/Fault tolerant
● Near real-time indexing

7. The Technology
Storage & Preservation
Fedora Commons is purpose built
for data preservation and long-term
data accessibility.
Key features include:
● Auditing & Fixity checks
● RDF Support
● Scales to millions of objects
● Support for virtually any filetype
● Files are readily accessible (no
lock-in)

8. Islandora
Open Source Digital Repository
Framework
Organizations can create
robust digital repository
systems tailored to their
specific needs and grow
the system to handle
virtually limitless amounts
of data.

9. The
Company
discoverygarden inc.

10. Service Provider
Removing Barriers to
Using Open Source
• Partner in the Islandora
Foundation
• Launched in 2010
• 92% of Islandora code is written
by discoverygarden on behalf
of customers
• Services listed here: http:
//www.discoverygarden.
ca/services/

11. It’s worth it to
invest in people
and ideas
instead of software
licenses...

12. Presentation
‘Highlighting the U.S.
National Agricultural Library’

13. Islandora Webinar:
Highlighting the U.S. National Agricultural Library
Chuck Schoppet
IT Specialist
United States Department of Agriculture
National Agricultural Library
May 18, 2016

14. What is the U.S. National
Agricultural Library?
• One of the world’s largest institutions of agricultural
knowledge
• One of the four national libraries of the United States
(plus the Library of Congress)
• Created during Abraham Lincoln’s administration in 1862
• The creator and maintainer of AGRICOLA (AGRICultural
OnLine Access)
14

15. AGRICOLA
• Is the largest bibliographic database of agricultural
knowledge in the world.
• Contains about 5 million records.
• Made up of two databases:
– Citations for journal articles, book chapters,
proceedings, etc. (75%)
– Bibliographic records and holdings for NAL’s print and
digital collections of books, audiovisuals, serials, and
other materials. (25%)
15

16. New opportunities and challenges
• New AGRICOLA-based product: PubAg, a search
engine for public access to citations for peer-reviewed
agricultural journal articles with access to the article’s
full-text.
– Increased production to 30,000 new articles per
month.
– Moved from human indexing to automatic machine
index.
– Transitioned from using MARC21 to more flexible
MODS. 16

17. Solution
• Islandora and Fedora Commons
– Greatest flexibility
– Well-supported in the community
– Built on a mature foundation
• Discoverygarden
– Expert knowledge of software
stack for performance and scaling
– Enhancement built on Islandora
– Knowledge transfer
17

18. Metadata Management System
18
Luxid
Automatic Indexing
Submission
Workflow
Unpack,
XSLT &
Ingest
Publisher Supplied
Journal Articles
USDA Authored
Articles
NALdoraManually created and
corrected Articles
Search, forms,
reports, management
Other NAL
Products
NALDC
PubAg
AGRICOLA

19. NALdora Highlights
• Staff journal article citation workflow
– Auto-populate the article object with journal and issue
information from first article
– Unicode character checker for Islandora forms
– Custom displays at the journals and issues levels
• Staff article citation quality workflow
• Auto-populate metadata from external databases by DOI
• Custom reports within Drupal with CSV download
19

20. A Queue too long
20
Where’s
my
article?
Fedora
gSearch
Batch articles: ingested, AI updated, etc.
Human keying articles

21. Islandora gSearcher Module
• Bypasses the queue of objects
waiting for SOLR indexing.
• Removes the need for ActiveMQ
between Fedora and gSearch.
• Greatly reduces the work load on
gSearch and SOLR
• Makes library staff happy!
21

22. 22
Chuck Schoppet
Chuck.Schoppet@usda.gov
Questions?
Acknowledgements:
Carol Dowling, Automated Indexing
Jennifer Gilbert, Metadata
Ying Li, IT
Ursula Pieper, IT
Shirley Souder, Metadata

23. Questions?
Contact us at: info@discoverygarden.ca

24. Thank you!
Contact us at: info@discoverygarden.ca