The Monash University Library’s Special Collections are a large and special compilation of various media like rare books, music and multimedia in various forms and languages such as Slavic, Asian, Yiddish and Jewish. These collections are considered among the most comprehensive in whole of Australasia. Hosted on legacy infrastructure, the original collection’s web presence has recently become a maintenance challenge for library administrators due to its legacy hardware and software stack. There was also a push in early 2016 to centralise the university’s data centre infrastructure, where the legacy collections platform is being hosted. This presented an opportunity for Monash University Library to to migrate the collections onto one of the latest community-supported public collections publishing platforms. After evaluation the open-source, freely available Omeka LAMP stack was chosen for the new platform.
Monash Collections Online Main Page
The R@CMon team engaged the various library stakeholders to spin-up a test instance of Omeka on the Monash node of the NeCTAR Research Cloud. The team at the library tested the various hosting and publishing capabilities of Omeka, including installation and integration of custom themes and plugins (e.g multimedia playback plugins). After several consultations, demonstrations and rigorous testing between the R@CMon and library teams, the executive decision has been made for Omeka to be the new publishing and showcasing platform for the library’s special collections.
Monash Collections Online Tall Tales and True Exhibition
The R@CMon team deployed a highly-available instance of Omeka on the NeCTAR Research Cloud utilising the LAMP stack plus HAProxy. Through VicNode, a dedicated and accessible storage share has been provisioned for the collections, housing the various types of files and media for current and future public showcases and exhibitions. The newly minted Monash Collections Online platform has been officially unveiled at the start of 2017 and is now publicly available. The new platform is also regularly updated with new content by the library team. Since its release, the R@CMon team continues to support the new platform through standard and regular engagements with the Monash University Library.