A case study on migrating large digital collections into a consolidated repository

Abstract

On July 1, 2020, the University of South Florida underwent a consolidation to merge three independently accredited branch campuses under a single umbrella. The Libraries responded to this change by consolidating their institutional repositories, which included a combination of theses, dissertations, faculty publications, open access journals, faculty publications, and digital collections. To make the most of this shared platform, administration determined that the Tampa campus would also merge their independent Digital Collections into the shared repository. Beginning in spring 2021, a team from the Tampa campus undertook the task of migrating over 65,000 digital objects across platforms into a newly consolidated institutional repository comprised of both digital scholarship and collections from multiple campuses.In addition to the technical improvements, holistic review of metadata structures, and data cleanup, the review opened the door to implement conscious editing initiatives to improve the language and discoverability of collections representing diverse populations. With the scale of the contents, it was not feasible to manually migrate items one at a time, so a batch method was devised. The original repository included item level metadata via METS/MODS XML. A script was created to scrape, concatenate, and transform the metadata into the Digital Commons batch upload XML standard. Accounting for unique metadata schemas throughout the repository, the batch process needed to be updated and revised on a collection-by-collection basis. This case study discusses the project planning, management and implementation of the migration.