We design software, manage repositories, and provide consultation to libraries and archives around the world.
Digital Culture Of Metropolitan New York
Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York (DCMNY) provides online access to digital collections that document the history of the Metropolitan New York region. Many participating institutions are located in New York City and surrounding counties, but contributions are open for institutions from around the world. You can find more information about participating in DCMNY here.
Archipelago
METRO is the development home of Archipelago Commons, or simply Archipelago, an Open Source Digital Objects Repository system based on the popular CMS Drupal and released under GPL V.3 License. Archipelago has been active since early 2019, has had over 6 major releases, and is currently providing online access to over 8 million digital objects and assets in repository collections all over the world.
METRO is committed to supporting Archipelago’s continued development and growing community of users as part of our institutional dedication to serving the wider digital repository and cultural heritage communities. METRO maintains resource allocations and specialized Digital Services staff for Archipelago’s long term stewardship in support of this important technical development and community services work. You can read more about Archipelago and METRO’s support of the project here.
Archipelago is a mix of deeply integrated custom-coded Drupal modules (the Strawberryfield Modules, made with care by METRO’s Digital Services team) and a curated and well-configured Drupal instance, running under a discrete and well-planned set of service containers. You can find more detailed technical information and user guides for Archipelago here.
Archipelago’s primary focus is to serve the diverse set of digital repository needs for libraries, archives, museums, universities and colleges, and cultural heritage organizations in both regional NYC, national, and international communities. Archipelago endeavours to achieve these advanced goals by providing a flexible, consistent, and unified way of describing, storing, linking, and exposing metadata and media assets that make up our communities’ rich repository collections. We respect identities, existing workflows, and we strive to design Archipelago in ways that empower communities of every size, shade, and shape.
Finally, Archipelago tries to stay humble, slim, and nimble with a small codebase full of inline comments and @todos. All of our work is driven by a clear and concise but thoughtful planned technical roadmap –updated in tandem with new releases. You can find Archipelago’s original and latest technical roadmaps here.
Support, Hosting, And Help
Archipelago Commons is entirely open source. You are encouraged to extend and configure it in any way you like. If you don’t have the bandwidth to do so, we may be able to help. We offer a variety of hosted options and support services. Our team is also available to provide Archipelago repository consultation services (for a minimum of 10 hours).
Please reach out to our Digital Services Staff, Diego Pino Navarro and Allison Sherrick, at repositorysupport@metro.org if you have any questions.