1. Motivations for DAMS Migration
Ayla Stein
Metadata Librarian
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Santi Thompson
Head of Digital Repository Services
University of Houston Libraries
Hello, thank you for having us here to give our presentation: “Motivations for DAMS Migration”

2. Presentation Overview
Background
Methodology
Results
Discussion
Limitations & Next Steps
Conclusion
First I’ll give you a brief overview of our presentation.
I’m going to talk a little bit about the background of the project and methodology
Followed by our results and the discussion
We’ll finish it up by talking about the limitations and next steps

3. Why do this study?
Last fall we sent out a survey called “Identifying Motivations for DAMS Migration”
The survey attempted to understand the rationale behind why institutions would move from one DAMS to another
Why did we do this study?
Initially because we had just started exploring the idea of migrating
Morphed into wanting to better understand why institutions are moving
Could help us build the case to administration and other stakeholders

4. Research Questions
What motivations prompt institutions to migrate from one DAMS to another?
In what directions are institutions moving? For example, are institutions moving from proprietary systems to open source systems?
To complete this particular study, we asked two questions
Question 1: What motivations prompt institutions to migrate from one DAMS to another?
Question 2: In what directions are institutions moving? For example, are institutions moving from proprietary systems to open source systems?

5. Methodology Eligibility Evaluation topics Topic selection
Survey design
OVERVIEW SLIDE!!
Now we’re at the hard part – how we conducted this study.
We’ll focus on the following aspects of the survey methodology:
Participation eligibility
Evaluation topics, which I’ll talk more about in a moment
Selection of these topics
And overall survey design

6. Eligibility
Respondents have completed the migration process from the “Old DAMS" to the "New DAMS“
Respondents are currently migrating from the “Old DAMS” to the “New DAMS“
Respondents have selected a “New DAMS” but have not started the migration process
Eligibility
In order to qualify for the survey, respondents had to fulfill one of the following three eligibility categories:
Institutions had completed migration from the “Old DAMS” to the “New DAMS”
Institutions were currently migrating from the “Old DAMS” to the “New DAMS”
Institutions selected a “New DAMS” but had not started the migration process.
After removing entries that were not eligible or were not fully completed, we had 49 responses to analyze for this study.

7. Evaluation Topics Implementation & Day-to- Day Costs
User Administration
Organizational Viability
Technical Support
System Administration
Extensibility
Information Retrieval & Access
Content Management
Preservation
User Interface Customization
Interoperability
Reputation
Metadata Standards
We identified these 13 evaluation topics, which were informed by the themes we saw from our literature review
“A Checklist for Evaluating Open Source Digital Library Software” – Goh et al.
“Evaluation of Digital Repository Software at the National Library of Medicine” – by librarians there

8. Survey Design Question Formats Demographic information System Movement
Selection & Ranking of Motivations
Survey Design
Survey questions for these topics were designed to be either a Likert scale of 1 [Not Important] to 4 [Very Important] or select all that apply.
The survey asked for key demographic information to help us understand how institutions prioritized potential motivations
Demographic questions required respondents to select and self-identify the “Old DAMS” and “New DAMS.”
The survey asked respondents to choose the top five motivations from the 13 topics and then prioritize those five selections in order from most important to least important.
Respondents would then answer questions that focused on the five topics they identified.
We used this method because the survey had over 100 questions total and we wanted people to actually complete it

9. Results Overview Survey Demographics Top 5 Topics Priority Rankings
Highlights from Top 5 Topics - Visualized
RESULTS OVERVIEW SLIDE
After removing entries that were not eligible or were not fully completed, we had 49 responses to analyze for this study.
We used the total, mean, standard deviation, and variance from survey questions in our analysis
Mean responses higher than 3.0 and a standard deviation and variance of less than 1.0 were considered to be important
In the following slides we will present some of our results.
We will be using word clouds to display some of this data
This is being done for aesthetic purposes only. We did not generate wordclouds as part of our research

10. Part of the demographics questions asked respondents which type of library they worked at
As you can see, over half of the eligible responses came from academic libraries.

11. As part of the demographics section, participants were asked at what stage of the migration process were their institutions at the time of the survey.
Almost 40% of all respondents were currently in the process of migrating from the “Old DAMS” to the “New DAMS” at the time of the survey.
35% had completed the migration process
24% had selected a new system but were still preparing to migrate.

12. The selection process took most respondents six months to one year to complete.
Thirteen respondents took over one year to select a new system
Twelve respondents took six months or less to select a new DAMS

13. The Survey asked respondents to identify their top five categories from the list of 13 options.
The categories with the most votes were:

14. Priority Ranks Rank 1: Implementation, Preservation, Extensibility
Rank 2: User Customization, Content Management, Technical
Support
Rank 3: Content Management, Extensibility
Rank 4: Content Management, Preservation, Information Retrieval,
System Administration
Rank 5: Metadata Standards, Technical Support, User Interface,
Interoperability
We then asked respondents to rank these categories from most important to least important.
The slide here represents the highest scoring categories for each rank.
Some categories received high priority ranks but failed to get enough overall votes to make it into the top five categories.
Implementation and Day to Day Cost received the most number one ranking votes, for example, but did not receive enough overall votes to make it into the top five

15. Content Management Results
*Switch Presenters*
Now I will highlight some of the features that respondents identified as either important or less important from each of the top 5 categories.
As we can see in this word cloud, the 3 most important considerations in content management for survey respondents were:
The capacity of the “New DAMS” to contain increasing amounts of digital objects over time without negatively impacting performance
The ability to batch upload content into the “New DAMS”
The ability to support various file formats
One area not considered important was the size limit for ingest

16. Metadata Results
The 3 most important considerations in metadata for survey respondents were:
• The ability to support multiple metadata schema
• The ability to support administrative, preservation, structural, and technical metadata standards
FYI, APSTM = Administrative, Preservation, Structural, and Technical Metadata
• The ability to support local metadata standards and practices
Less important considerations included:
• The “New DAMS” supports linked data technologies
• The ability to support user created metadata, such as tags or “folksonomies”

17. Extensibility Results
For extensibility, important considerations included:
• Institutions can create their own modules/plugins/widgets/etc. for the “New DAMS”
• The “New DAMS” has an available API
• The code base is available for everyone to see and use (open source)
Less important considerations included:
• The “New DAMS” supports personal digital identifiers
• The “New DAMS” natively supports sharing to social media
Not Important Considerations:
• The “New DAMS” to authenticate with social media SSO (single sign on) services (Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, Gravatar, etc.)

18. Preservation Results
For preservation, important considerations included:
• The ability generate checksum values for ingested digital assets
• The ability perform fixity verification for ingested digital assets
• The ability to assign unique identifiers for each AIP
Less important considerations included:
• The “New DAMS” supports multiple copies of the repository - including dark and light (open and closed) instances

19. UI Customization Results
For User Interface Customization, the important considerations included:
• The ability to change interface features of the “New DAMS” to fit local needs
• The ability to custom brand the interface of the “New DAMS”
• The interface of the “New DAMS” supports responsive web design
The less important considerations included:
• The governing organization will do custom branding or feature selection for subscribing institutions

20. Technical Support Results
For Technical Support, the important considerations included:
• Technical documentation for the “New DAMS” is readily available
• There is dedicated technical support available from the developer or from a third party
• Effectiveness of customer service support
The less important considerations included:
• There is an active developer community around the “New DAMS”
• There is a ticket submission feature for reporting issues

21. Discussion What needs and/or factors prompt institutions to migrate?
What “direction” are institutions migrating?
Overall theme
From these results, we answered our two research questions:
What needs, blah blah
What "direction" are institutions migrating?
There are many specific needs, but from our results we see an overarching need for self-autonomy and control that drives organizations to migrate from one DAMS to another.
It should then come as no surprise that survey respondents are trending towards DAMS derived from open source software.
This study produced a large amount of data and the conclusions one could draw from it exceeds the time limits of this presentation.
Therefore, we will highlight some important implications that specifically give evidence to the overarching need for self-autonomy and control .

22. Self Control Content Management: Scalability
Metadata: Multiple Schema & Flexibility
Extensibility: Local Development
UI Customization: Local Design Decisions
For content management, this overarching need for self-autonomy and control is expressed through system scalability and performance. For example, some systems may encounter performance issues as more items are added despite having licenses that promise support for unlimited objects.
For metadata, the need for autonomy and control manifests itself in respondents' desire for New DAMS to support numerous descriptive metadata schemas (including DC, MODS, and EAD)
however, the current generation of DAMS are built around one or two specific metadata schema,
e.g. contentDM uses a Dublin Core variation; DSpace requires Qualified Dublin Core or DC-terms as the default schema;
Islandora, which generates Dublin Core datastreams by default, with optional MODS metadata for increased description, is beginning to incorporate multiple descriptive metadata schema
Fedora 4 may see this desire implemented through its support of linked data
For extensibility, these results pretty obviously support desire for self-autonomy/control since respondents favored building additional functionality locally far more than having a vendor or governing body do so.
For UI Customization, respondents desire the freedom to make interface decisions and changes, even with the option of having the governing organization maintain and customize the interface on behalf of the subscribing institution.

23. Third Party Support
Technical Support: a role for governing organizations, vendors, and communities
The results for technical support suggest that respondents desire the ability to solicit assistance from a designated group.
Despite the overall trend of institutions building their own systems, institutions still want and need external expertise to assist them with their technical challenges.

24. Inconclusive Digital Preservation: Contradictory Results
Other results posed more questions than answers.
For digital preservation, respondents desired support for bit level preservation (fixity generation and checking);
however, there was no consensus around native support for other programmatic elements, like preservation metadata, storage in multiple locations, repository replication

25. Our second research question asked in which direction were institutions migrating
Prior to migration, a slight majority of respondents (52%) used proprietary systems to administer their digital library environments including DigiTool and CONTENTdm.
Just over one-quarter (27%) of respondents used open source repositories before migrating.
A handful of other respondents were using home grown software or “other” approaches.
After an institution elected to migrate from their “Old DAMS” to their “New DAMS,” a majority of respondents indicated that they would be migrating to an open source platform (64%), primarily Islandora, Hydra/Fedora, and DSpace.
This slide illustrates the dramatic shift from proprietary to open source

26. Limitations & Next Steps
Future Research
Institutional/ Data Repositories
Limitations
First, our survey sample was not as diverse as it could have been. We did not send calls for survey participation out to international audiences, besides DigLib listserv, or any Museum/SLA/Government library listservs
Second, our scope was limited because we focused our study exclusively on digital repositories that host digital collections not institutional repositories; this may have eliminated those institutions that have a single repository for multiple purposes
Third, portions of our survey lacked sufficient definitions. Also, we used awkward or confusing word choices when asking questions in some sections of the survey.
In the future, we will conduct another study that focuses on institutional & data repositories

28. Images Cited
All pictures used in this presentation, unless otherwise indicated, are from gettyimages.com
All charts, graphs, and remaining content in the presentation were created by Ayla Stein and Santi Thompson and are available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.