Summary
The objective of the pilot was to migrate a large Newspaper title (187,331 objects) and a modern digitised Journal with complex rights issues.
Project Details
To start the process we are migrating 6 objects: 1 Newspaper Title, 1 issue and 4 pages so we can analize in detail how the migration has affected the Fedora 3 objects. Once this small batch has completed successfully we can test with a larger batch.
We went through a useful process of mapping the Newspaper objects and hierarchy to PCDM which introduced staff at the library to the power of Fedora 4. Results of this mapping can be seen at PCDM Mapping for Welsh Newspapers (NLW).
Migration Process
We chose to migrate from a native fcrepo3 filesystem as the Newspaper Content will take a long time to export. We developed a script which takes in a list of PIDs and creates a native fedora 3 file system with only the objects and datastreams we are interested in. This allowed us to use Fedora 4 migration-utils with the following configuration:
- Native fcrepo3 filesystem ( nativeFoxmlDirectoryObjectSource )
- Legacy Fedora filesystem ( legacyIDResolver )
We are currently testing this configuration and analyzing the results.
Issues
We have encountered the following issues:
- A problem with how related collections are created
https://github.com/fcrepo4-labs/migration-utils/issues/15
The resolution was to develop a customer ID Mapper:
and to customize the locations of created resources.
- A problem with multiple versions of RELS-EXT
The Newspaper title has 203 versions of the RELS-EXT datastream which is causing some problems for the migration:
https://github.com/fcrepo4-labs/migration-utils/issues/18
Feedback
The migration process has shown we have a lot to learn before we can start using Fedora 4. The migration-utils are easy to use but without some knowledge of Fedora 4 it is difficult to understand what is going wrong if you come across errors. The Fedora 4 web interface is very different to the Fedora 3 interface and takes some getting used to. It has been useful to be involved in the migration testing as it has increased our understanding of Fedora 4 and some of the opportunities it will give us in the future. It has also been useful to test the migration tools with a custom Fedora 3 repository like ourselves to see what issues we will come across in the future.
Future Plans
We will continue to work on migrating the content we have selected to thoroughly test the migration utils and also increase our knowledge of Fedora 4.
