Chulin Meng
Director of Library Technology
Lehigh University
Joe Corall
Senior Library Application Developer
Lehigh University
This talk shares the journey at Lehigh University of implementing Islandora as a unified digital repository platform for library staff to manage and provide access to special collections and archive items, faculty and student publications, research data, and other teaching/scholarship materials. As libraries face the growing challenge of managing, sharing, and preserving diverse digital assets, their Islandora solution, built on the robust framework of Drupal 10 and an event-driven microservices architecture, stands out as a promising answer to these needs. This session will outline Drupal’s rich ecosystem of modules for digital content management, highlight the innovative features of their Islandora digital repository, such as automatically transcribing audio/video files using OpenAI Whisper, as well as discuss the lessons learned during their implementation process. Attendees will gain insights into how the new Islandora open platform is redefining digital preservation strategies.