Calisphere Service Announcements

Posted over 3 years ago by Christine Kim

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Christine Kim Admin

Since the release of the Calisphere we know and love, the site has grown from 400,000 items to nearly 2 million -- growing five times in size since 2015! We’re thankful to collaborate with over 300 partner organizations to highlight the unique collections and stories throughout the state.

 

Calisphere aggregates collections from your local digital asset management systems, and we ideally look for programmatic solutions to do so, through a “harvesting” process to grab a thumbnail version of your resources as well as a copy of the descriptive metadata. Our current Calisphere harvester uses older technologies adapted from the Digital Public Library of America's (DPLA) version 1 harvesting stack, developed in 2013. During this past year, we have been investigating new technologies to update Calisphere’s harvesting infrastructure


Introducing Rikolti

We are thrilled to introduce Rikolti, a new project currently in development to update our Calisphere harvesting infrastructure. Our goal is to implement a more streamlined and efficient framework, which may also be able to support highly desired features such as full-text searching of items in Calisphere. Please visit our project GitHub page for details on our development plan, technology framework, as well as our requirements. 


Update on the Calisphere harvesting and publication schedule

Building Rikolti will be highly intensive; we’re committed to developing infrastructure that uses current, well-supported systems that can continuously support the statewide aggregation of digital cultural heritage resources. To carve out the required developer resources and time, we will be making the following temporary adjustments:


  • We will be publishing new Calisphere indexes every other week (in lieu of weekly). This means that new collections and updates to collections will go live on a biweekly basis.

  • If your organization has a regular re-harvesting schedule (e.g., bimonthly) we will be in touch with you to discuss alternative schedules.


Update on the DPLA harvesting schedule

Unrelated but topically similar, we’d like to share an update on the Calisphere to DPLA harvesting schedule. For 2021, DPLA will be harvesting from Calisphere two times this year, in April and August. This is a change from our previous bi-monthly schedule, harvesting every other month for a total of six harvests throughout the year.


As many have experienced, the COVID-19 pandemic brought  unforeseeable impacts to resources and budget. As a precaution, CDL deferred its 2020-21 DPLA Hub membership, which impacts the frequency of the harvesting schedule. Though CDL is not participating in the membership program this year, its role as a DPLA Service Hub will not change: DPLA will continue to harvest from Calisphere, but at a reduced pace.


Please note that we don’t foresee any additional service impacts regarding DPLA. In the meantime, we will be evaluating our membership budget for the 2021-22 timeframe. Please contact us if you have any questions.

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