Archipelago Commons, or simply Archipelago, is an evolving Open Source Digital Objects Repository / DAM Server Architecture based
on the popular CMS Drupal8/9 and released under GLP V.3 Licence.
Archipelago is a mix of deeply integrated custom-coded Drupal8 modules (made with care by us) and a curated and well-configured Drupal8 instance, running under a discrete and and well-planned set of service containers. All of this driven by a clear and concise but thoughtfull planned technical roadmap.
Archipelago was dreamt as a multi-tenant, distributed, capable system (as its name suggests!) and can live isolated or in flocks of similar deployments, sharing storage, services, or -- even better -- just the discovery layer. Learn more about the different Software Services used by Archipelago.
Archipelago's primary focus is to serve the GLAM community by providing a flexible, consistent, and unified way of describing, storing, linking, exposing metadata and media assets. We respect identities and existing workflows.
All of this operates under a different concept than the one we all have become used to in recent times.
We like to think this is not done by re-inventing the wheel, but by making sure the road is clean, level, and with fewer obstacles than before. We do this by removing some heavy weight from the top, some unneeded ballast, plus, of course, some well positioned innovations to make the ride enjoyable.
We also like to say that Archipelago is like a Metadata Synthetizer (LFO anyone?) and we want to give you all the knobs, parameters, inputs and outputs to make the best out of it. Still, you can make "music" by just tapping the keyboard.
Finally, Archipelago tries to stay humble, slim, and nimble in nature with a small code base full of inline comments and @todos.
To get here we had to do a full stop first. Look around. Questioning everything we knew. Research and test (repeat) and then re-architect slowly on new and old assumptions, and especially new community values.
Learn what makes Archipelago so different and hopefully also a well known place.
Archipelago integrates transparently into the Drupal 8 ecosystem using its Core Content Entity System (Nodes), Discovery (Search API) and in general all its Core Components plus a few well maintained external ones.
By design (and because we think its imperative), Archipelago takes full charge of the metadata layer and associated media assets by implementing a highly configurable, smart Drupal field written in JSON named strawberryfield that attaches to any content.
All of JSON's internals, keys, paths, and values are dynamically exposed to the rest of the ecosystem. Strawberryfield even remembers its structure as data evolves by storing JSON apths of every little detail.
Explore what strawberryfield does, why we built it, and what issues it addresses.
Archipelago includes two additional companion modules, webform_strawberryfield and format_strawberryfield that
extend the core metadata capabilities of Strawberryfield and allow the same flexibility to be exposed during ingest and viewing of digital objects.
Webform Strawberryfield (we had a better name) extends and integrates into the amazing Drupal Webform module to allow Archipelago users to build any possible metadata and media, ingest and edit, workflows directly via the UI using web forms.
By not having a hardcoded ingest method, Archipelago can be used outside the GLAM community too, as a pure data repository in biological sciences, Digital Humanities, archives, or even as a mixed, mutant cross-domain system.
We also added WIKIDATA, LoC and Getty Authority querying elements to aid in linking to external Linked Open Data sources.
All these integrations are made to help local needs and community identities to survive the never-ending race for the next metadata schema. They are made to prototype, plan, and grow independently of how metadata will need to be exposed yesterday or tomorrow. And we plan to add more.
Explore what other features webform_strawberryfield provides to help with ingesting, reading, and interacting with your metadata during that process.
Format Strawberryfield (we had even a better name but...) deals with taking your JSON based metadata and casting, mashing, mixing, exposing, displaying, and transforming it to allow rich interaction for users and other systems with your digital objects.
In its guts (or heart?), Archipelago does something quite simple but core to our concept of repository: it transforms in realtime the close to your needs open schema metadata that lives in strawberryfield as JSON into close to other one's fixed schema needs metadata; any destination format, using a fast, cached templating system. A templating system easy enough to master and core to Drupal, called Twig.
This templating system is exposed to Archipelago users through the UI and stored side by side in the repository as content
(we named them Metadata Display entities, but they not only serve display needs!) so users can fully control how metadata is transformed and published without touching their individual sources.
Templates or recipes can be shared, exported, ingested, updated, and adapted in many ways. Fast changes are possible without having to wait for the next mayor release of Archipelago or your favorited Metadata Schema Specs Committee agreeing on the next or the last version. Of course, this module not only handles metadata but media assets too, extracting local or remote URIs and files from your metadata and rendering them as media viewers: books, 3D models, images, panoramas, A/V with IIIF in its soul. Discover what format_strawberryfield can do and what many other possibilities are exposed through our templating system.
To get a general glance of what is included and how it works deploy our latest beta locally using Docker using this Guide covering for now OSX and Ubuntu 18.04.
Now that you have it running, it's time to ingest your first digital object. Follow this Guide to master the basics.
Archipelago welcomes and appreciates any type of contribution, from use cases and needs, questions, documentation, devops and configuration and -- of course -- code, fixes, or new features. To make the process less painful, we recommend you first to read our documentation and deploy a local instance. After that please follow this set of guidelines to help you get started.
This software is a Metropolitan New York Library Council Open-Source initiative and part of the Archipelago Commons project.