Overview
With a catalog of digital assets numbering in the millions, the John F. Kennedy Library maintains a thorough historical record of President Kennedy’s works and legacy. The Library faced a critical need to migrate its vast digital archives - its legacy Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, EMC Documentum, was being retired. After a robust discovery and vendor selection process with DAM partners AVP, the JFK Library was set to migrate its millions of digital assets to Orange Logic DAM. With the decision to migrate to OrangeDAM, an intricate integration with their Drupal website was required to ensure seamless access to historical archives online.
The Challenge
The primary challenge of the project was the complexity of integrating Drupal with OrangeDAM while maintaining the integrity and accessibility of JFK Library’s extensive digital archives. Specific issues included:
- Migrating Digital Archives: Migrating digital assets — spanning from documents, photographs, videos, and metadata — from OrangeDAM to Drupal without losing any metadata or other assets.
- Enhancing User Experience: Redesigning the search functionality with a new Solr hosting provider to handle increased data complexity, and implementing a new asset viewer to provide users with an intuitive and comprehensive way to explore the archives.
- Data Modeling and Content Mapping: Developing new content types and refining the data model to improve usability.
- Multi-Environment and Version Management: Ensuring that the OrangeDAM to Drupal integration would minimize data duplication while keeping performance high on the live digital archives site, and while maintaining compatibility with existing workflows.
Chromatic's Approach
Chromatic led the development of the Drupal DAM integration through several key approaches:
- Discovery + Technical Audit Phase: The team conducted a thorough analysis to identify the project’s risks, challenges, and technical requirements. This included creating architecture diagrams, documenting the data flow, and outlining the technical approach.
- API Integration: The integration utilized API requests to minimize data storage in Drupal, focusing on keeping only essential data for search functionality. Drupal was used primarily for display and control logic, reducing the load on the system by relying on OrangeDAM for storing the majority of the data.
- Open Source Module Development: Chromatic developed a custom Drupal module Orange DAM and Orange DAM PHP library that handled API requests to OrangeDAM, queued building for data synchronization, and managed the migration of assets. This module was built with open-source principles in mind, laying the groundwork for future community contributions and other team adoption.
- Search Optimization: A new search experience was designed and implemented using Solr, integrated with both Drupal and OrangeDAM. This allowed users to search across all digital archives from the site, improving the find-ability of assets.
- IIIF and Asset Viewer: Building a new Asset Viewer leveraging IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework), providing high-quality image rendering and zooming capabilities for web users. This was particularly important for displaying large historical documents and photographs with their metadata from the archive on the web.
Results
- Improved Data Management: By migrating to OrangeDAM, the JFK Library gained a scalable solution capable of handling future growth in its digital archives.
- Enhanced User Experience: The new search and asset viewer features significantly improved how users interact with the JFK Library’s digital assets, making it easier for researchers and the public to access historical materials.
- Open-Source Contributions: Chromatic and the JFK Library successfully developed the project with an open-source approach, contributing the OrangeDAM and PHP Library Drupal modules to the community, potentially benefiting other GLAM institutions.
Conclusion
The integration of Drupal with OrangeDAM for the JFK Library demonstrates how large-scale institutions can leverage open-source technologies to manage, present, and preserve vast collections of digital archives. Through careful planning, collaboration, and the development of custom tools, Chromatic helped the JFK Library build a performant, flexible digital archive solution that enhances access for everyone from professional archivists to enthusiasts to important historical resources contributing to the library's mission of preserving the memory of the United States' thirty-fifth president.
