A Look at the Open-Source Powered NY Philharmonic Digital Archives

From CIO Insight:

Mitch Brodsky, digital project manager at the New York Philharmonic, has helped create a comprehensive, high-resolution digital archive that makes the online experience as satisfying as researching at the reading room table.The Philharmonic’s archives, officially called the Leon Levy Digital Archives, relies on open-source technology to tie the archives together. Brodsky shares with CIO Insight how the archives allow researchers to access the archives from anywhere, anytime, for free, why it’s important to preserve pieces of the past and a few surprises uncovered during the archiving process.

Here’s one question and answer from the interview.

CIO Insight: What technology ties together the archiving system?
Brodsky: Alfresco forms the foundation of the Digital Archives, as it stores all the digitized documents (3 million pages by the end of 2018). Our system also relies heavily on Apache Solr, an incredibly fast, customizable and reliable open-source search server. The glue that ties it all together, though, is a migration tool developed by our Alfresco partner Technology Services Group, called OpenMigrate. This tool has the ability to transfer data between all parts of our system, including image ingestion, Solr indexing, OCR processing and derivative creation. Our implementation would have been far more painful without a reliable bulk migration tool.

Read the Complete Interview
Direct to the New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital Archive
See Also: New York Philharmonic Adds More Material/Open Access Data to Digital Archive (February 20, 2015)
See Also: New York Philharmonic’s Online Archives Project Receive $2.4 Million Grant, Digitization Will Continue (February 5, 2014)

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Data Files, Digital Collections, Digital Preservation, Funding, Interviews, News, Open Access, Profiles