Page History

This chapter focuses on explaining the way that Islandora understands content, and providing basic instructions for how you can create, view, update, and delete (purge) content in your repository. This chapter presumes that you have access to a running instance of Islandora, either through the online sandbox, or the a virtual machine image. on on your local machine. If you have a full running instance of Islandora with solution packs installed, this chapter will show you how to perform basic functions.  Both the online sandbox and the VM come with pre-installed collections that will be used as examples in this documentation.

If you do not have access to an instance of Islandora, please review Chapter 2 - Accessing Islandora.

Both the online sandbox, and the VM come with pre-installed collections for you to interact with. These instructions presume that you are either using one of these environments OR that you have a working instance of Islandora with solution packs installed.

How Islandora Understands Content

Before accessing and using Islandora, it is important to learn how Islandora understands your content. Islandora uses Fedora Commons’s flexible Digital Object Model, RelationshipsCommons’ flexible digital object model, relationships, and content model architecture. If you are familiar with these concepts, you may find this section repetitive, because it borrows heavily from the Fedora Commons documentation to provide what is most relevant for Islandora.

The following is an attempt to distill this information down to what is most relevant when getting started with Islandora. Understanding Islandora means understanding the following:

• Everything in Islandora's repository is an Object 
• Objects have are made up of Datastreams
• Objects have Relationships to one another
• Objects have Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) that you may be asked to configureare unique in your repository

Everything

...

in Islandora's repository is an Object

Everything in Islandora’s Fedora Commons Repository is an “object,” object made up of “Datastreams.” You might think broadly of an object as datastreams. An object is like a directory or folder full of different files (the datastreams). However, unlike the folder system on your computer (which contain other folders), Islandora's information architecture is graph-like, more like a network. There are several kinds of objects, and each object performs a different function. You could think about three kinds of objects: Islandora's main object types are Content Model Objects, Collection Objects, and Data Objects.

...