November 27, 2019

Time/Place

This meeting is a hybrid teleconference and IRC chat. Anyone is welcome to join. Here is the info:

• Time: 1:00pm Eastern Daylight Time US (UTC-4)
• Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/203396828
• IRC:
  • Join the #islandora chat room via Freenode Web IRC (enter a unique nick)
  • Or point your IRC client to #islandora on irc.freenode.net

Attendees

• Danny Lamb
• Melissa Anez 🦃
• Jared Whiklo
• Eli Zoller
• Alexander O'Neill
• Alan Stanley
• Mark Jordan

Agenda

1. Documentation Sprint Results: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1E-kRw9xE60CKK0qL1-phzeVKjEZu3qBKZ9d3LH1hDEE/edit#gid=0
2. Continued Content Modeling Discussion
3. Issue Roundup
   1. https://github.com/Islandora/documentation/issues/1359
   2. https://github.com/Islandora/documentation/issues/1360
   3. https://github.com/Islandora/documentation/issues/1361
   4. https://github.com/Islandora/documentation/issues/1364
   5. https://github.com/Islandora/documentation/issues/1366
   6. https://github.com/Islandora/documentation/issues/1367
   7. https://github.com/Islandora/documentation/issues/1369
   8. https://github.com/Islandora/documentation/issues/1372
   9. https://github.com/Islandora/documentation/issues/1373
5. ... (feel free to add agenda items)

Minutes

Documentation Sprint

Sprint is over, but a few PRs remain. The new Install docs from Dan Aitken could use a second look so we can get them in. Question has come up about what do with our "administrator" documentation. Repository Administrator? Systems Administrator? Danny will make a final pass over the docs to sort things out. Overall, a great sprint. Lots of engagement, lots of new content and improved content.

Content Modeling

Last discussion ended with the idea that media should reference multiple files; a primary, and associates that are coupled with it. We'd like to lay out a tentative idea, for the Special Topics call to discuss and pick apart, to see where we land.

Core anxiety, especially from MIG, is that we don't have a 'fence.' Which is scary, and prevents the dog from running out to play. So, what are the parameters within which you can make your changes? What are the things that we can't change? They might be fuzzy, but there are a lot of people who will just tweak the defaults because they are afraid of what will happen if they do anything that isn't in those defaults. Key questions:

What is provided by Islandora? What is provided by Drupal? What is provided by Controlled Access Terms? What can we override? What is the 'thing' they are storing? Example: a dataset. The researcher might not want to provide metadata for every file; the set is the thing. But it still needs to be editable.

We can use multiple content types, field permissions, etc... but it's easy to get off the right path if you're doing something non-standard. Folks may be assuming that f you stick with defaults, you'll be "taken care of," but that isn't the goal for defaults. It's a starter to build on.

7 put a lot of constraints on us because we had to fit into the Fedora 3 object model. Now we're much more free, but it makes it harder to define structural things. Is a collection an object? Sure, if you're an archive. Is a book page an objects? Or is a book an ordered list? For most, a book is the thing. Not the pages. Users will almost never look at those pages on their own.

What tangible next steps? Rosie proposes: we leave image, media, video, etc within Repo Item. Take out Collection and Paged Content (or at least, the pages). Make the pages as stubs, parts of an ordered thing. This is a good place for the drop-a-bunch-of-files interface (as opposed to a collection). But some pages do need their own metadata, so those objects... are not defaults!

We should clean up our CRUD form for the default repo nodes, too. We need some UX eyes on it. Vertical tabs. Fields groups.

Media: files have metadata, because we require a title. They can also have weight. Technical metadata.

Fedora has authors. Which is the Drupal user who made it. There's no meaningful distinction in Fedora about this (not that there was for Islandora 7, either).

We are not bound to PCDM.

Take-away suggestions from discussions:

• Attaching multiple files to a medium
• Take results of derivative and do something other than create a file (stick it in a text file, etc)
• Distinguish collections from repository items. And anything else?

Danny will take these concepts, make Google doc, and we'll further refine so we can put something solid in front of a special topics call and know what we want to ask folks.

Issue Round Up

Ran out of time.