Ethnic Studies Library, UC Berkeley
Retaining Data Integrity During Massive Framework Upgrade
Client
Ethnic Studies Library, UC Berkeley
Headquarters
Berkeley, CA
Industry
Library Information Science
Website
Services
- Business Technology Strategy
- Data / System Migration
- Business Software Development
- Custom Software Solution
- Project Planning / Management
- Information Architecture / UX
The Challenge
The Ethnic Studies Library at the University of California, Berkeley needed to urgently upgrade their custom digital indexing platform, originally built in a version of Drupal that had reached its End of Life. This upgrade needed to be completed on budget and on deadline, and included a secure, scalable, and high-performance migration—while maintaining all content, metadata, and user relationships without error, disruption, or data loss.
The Solution
iS2 Digital worked with the library staff to address the urgent need to upgrade their digital platform after Drupal reached end-of-life.
Key challenges included: preserving an extensive scholarly content (85,000+ entries), maintaining the sophisticated citation management functionality, ensuring zero data loss during migration, and enhancing the application by creating a responsive, modern user interface.
Project Details
- Successfully migrated from Drupal version reaching end of life to current version.
- Extended Drupal's migration API with custom code to process 85,000+ content entries and maintain all data relationships.
- Implemented field mapping strategies to preserve content structure and relationships between content types.
- Migrated user accounts preserving roles, permissions, and user-content relationships.
- Developed advanced citation search functionality with multiple filtering options and customized CSV export.
- Extended existing application with advanced index term search and replacement and content bulk updates.
- Enhanced user experience through responsive design and streamlined management workflows.
The Client
The Ethnic Studies library at UC Berkeley was established in 1997 by merging the Asian American Studies Library, the Chicano Studies Library and the Native American Studies Library. In the late 1960s, the collections of these founding libraries grew from student interest in collecting and preserving a perspective that was lacking in other campus libraries. The specialized ethnic studies books and serials, archival collections, posters, and audio collections from those three libraries live on in a centralized space on the ground floor of Stephens Hall. The library consists of these four collections: Asian American Studies Collection; Chicano Studies Collection; Native American Studies Collection; Comparative Ethnic Studies Collection.
