Franco American Digital Archives
The Franco American Digital Archive aims to be the premier resource for digital collections relating to the French-Canadian diaspora in the United States. The portal will host approximately 10,000 metadata records from partner institutions around the country in a federated discovery portal. In the future the project may also provide dedicated digital collections hosting for smaller institutions that do not maintain their own digital asset management system.
Leveraging Islandora 2.0’s multilingual capabilities, exceptional discovery mechanisms, and
multi-institution collection management
Multilingual interfaces
The Archives supports French and English-language collections and Francophone and Anglophone user communities, making multilingual support essential. Islandora facilitates automated translation of interfaces with the click of a button, giving users the option to toggle to their preferred language.
Robust discovery
Islandora offers flexible, modern discovery mechanisms, from autocompleted search suggestions to a browseable index of controlled vocabulary terms. The Franco American Digital Archives leverages Islandora’s named entity support to provide quick access to a range of thematic collections around topics such as mining, strikes and demonstrations, and daily life.
Multi-institution support
Using Islandora’s Workbench tool to migrate metadata into the website allows one CSV template to be shared with all institutions, to which they can add their data. A custom taxonomy was easily added through the Drupal user interface, to allow the end user to sort and filter metadata by institution. Additionally, several other custom fields were added, without any coding required, to ensure the metadata is labeled and organized in a way that meets the Franco American Portal’s unique needs.