Report on Lightweight Digital Collections Platforms

Abstract

Our team started with a curiosity about Scalar and along the way formed a collaboration with two graduate students to compare it with three similar services. These “lightweight digital collection platforms” as we call them each have potential to fit the needs of students, staff, and faculty who want to build their own digital collection. Supporting this kind of scholarship using these tools today is very challenging, however, because none of them quite meet all of the requirements. In the end, we found ourselves imagining a drupal-based cloud platform and service designed for small digital collections, which we call “drupal.edu”.