National Innovation Achievement Award for UPEI’s Islandora

Islandora, an open-source software platform developed by UPEI's Robertson Library to manage and archive large amounts of digital data, has been selected for a national innovation achievement award by the Canadian Association of College and University Libraries (CACUL). The annual award recognizes institutions that have made a significant contribution to the development and advancement of academic librarianship.

'Islandora represents a massive undertaking and an impressive result, built by a very small library whose work will have a vast impact as it is replicated elsewhere,' stated CACUL in its announcement of the award.

Islandora was born two years ago when University Librarian Mark Leggott was building Virtual Research Environments, or VREs, at UPEI. Each VRE makes it possible for teams of researchers to collaborate and communicate, and manage and archive their work in a secure online environment. More than 50 research groups currently use the VRE system, including the Mollusc Health Lab, Marine Natural Products Lab, and the L.M. Montgomery Institute.

The VRE software is also the basis of the library's digital collections, including newspapers, magazines, books, audio, and video. Islandora is being used to create a range of digital resources that are valuable and accessible to the broader community, including IslandLives, which archives community and church histories from around Prince Edward Island, and IslandScholar, a repository for UPEI scholarly publications.

'As a society we benefit from knowledge created in the past because so much printed material has survived,' says Leggott. 'Now we must effect the same level of protection and stewardship of information that is digital. We have developed Islandora to help libraries and other institutions to do this.'

Islandora is catching the attention of researchers and universities around the world. The University of New Brunswick and the University of North Texas and Los Alamos have installed Islandora to manage and archive some of their data; and other major institutions are expected to follow.

This is the second time in the past year that Islandora has been nationally recognized. The Canadian Association of University Business Officers selected it as the top project in the Atlantic region for quality and productivity in 2009.