Adventures in Migrating Massive Archival Collections to Digital Commons

Abstract

Giant collections of compound objects, with messy metadata, led to migration in batches and lessons learned. When the University of Mississippi Libraries implemented a campus-wide institutional repository, it also became necessary to use the same platform for nearly 100 digital collections, requiring migration from a locally hosted instance of CONTENTdm to the cloud-based Digital Commons. Because the collections were primarily comprised of compound objects, it was difficult to use harvesting protocol to populate the new repository, requiring new access copies to be reconfigured and uploaded as batches from the local servers after extensive metadata remediation.

Keywords

• institutional repositories
• migration
• digital collections
• contentdm
• academic libraries