This case study summarizes the Art Institute of Chicago Collections team’s engagement in Open Source communities since the start of the LAKE project (an institutional repository, DAMS and publishing API for the AIC Collections) in 2013. As a large museum dealing with complex content models and system integration, as well as with preservation concerns, AIC embraced software, standards and models maintained by scholarly communities. This has proven so far to be a solid long-term strategy that is fraught with many short-term challenges. The author intends to share the experience gathered so far in the process of pushing a museum IT team closer to the Libraries and Archives environment, and more actively engaging with community-supported software and standards development, than the majority of its peers. Over the course of the last 5 years the AIC team has gained experience about what is convenient to develop collaboratively, and how to invest in this collaboration; and what is considered a better fit for in house development, which can eventually be shared with the community. The author will describe the inter-dependent projects that make up the LAKE ecosystem from a strategic standpoint and the community-related approach taken for each of them.

1. Labours of Love
& Convenience
Stefano Cossu • The Art Institute of Chicago
Open Repositories 2018 • 06-06-2018 • Bozeman MT, USA
Or: Dealing with Community-Supported Knowledge

2. The Problem
Build a Museum DAMS
● CMS built in-house for 15+ years
● Some integrated image & media
management
● A separate system was needed for a full
DAM framework
● Completely covered by capital funds
Goals Defined
● Full data ownership and transparency
● Responsiveness to changing demands
● Scalability (size and complexity)

3. Black Boxes
&
Hack Boxes

4. The Choices
At Hand
Introduce Black Boxes?
● Concerns over compatibility
● Unknown costs for accommodating
changing requests over time
● Unimpressed by API reviews
Add More Hack Boxes?
● Don't want to reinvent repo technology
● Lack of in-house resources and expertise
In Between: Community Software
● An entirely new territory
● No clear precedents in the Museum
community

5. An Unexpected
Culture Shift
Changing Our Activity Focus
● More on community activity
● Less on code
Changing Scope of Development:
● Less freedom
● More convenience?
● More knowledge

6. LAKE:
The Strategy
Deployed
Repository: Fedora
DAMS: Samvera
ETL framework: Combine
Integration: Apache Camel
RDF Index: Blazegraph
Flat Index: Solr
Web Publishing: Marmotta
IIIF Server: Cantaloupe

7. Clashes
Scope
Mission
(Open Access,
standards, & all
the good stuff)
"Getting
Things
Done"
Stability &
Safety
Feature
Requests
Testing,
Tech Debt
Removal
Short-Term
Schedules
Prioritization
Release Cycles

8. How We Fare
Now
● 650K resources in the repository
● 124M triples in Blazegraph (mostly ACLs*)
● Tens of thousands of updates a day
● Syncs are too slow—too many data points
copied around
● System has never crashed in production
*Access Control Lists stored as Fedora resources

9. Things We
Wanted to Do
And Haven't
Done
● Make LAKE a community project
○ Resources & focus challenges
○ Museum community challenges
● Actually contribute & share
○ American Art Collaborative
○ DPLA
○ Linked Data access points
● Leverage public grant support

10. Lessons
Learned
● It takes a great deal of dedication
● Build progress in small, regular increments
● Earn confidence from stakeholders
gradually
● Only then it's easier to set safer timelines
● Only after that we can be better citizens

11. Thank You
& Questions
Boring Rights Metadata
Black box image: http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/art/big-images/doi-box-hi-res.jpg
Arduino image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arduino_Uno_002.jpg
Icons:
Boxer and fencing: Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com
Community by shashank singh from the Noun Project
arduino by uizin from the Noun Project