Development Support for the Open‑Source Software “Kitodo.Production”

Kitodo. Key to digital objects e.V.

Kitodo.Production is a web-based tool to support digitalization work in libraries and museums. It is developed by a non-profit alliance consisting of various libraries, archives and related companies.

Project Context

Digitalization processes are modelled as sequential tasks. The exact tasks can be defined with a workflow editing tool. Each task is then assigned to and processed by specific users or users of a certain role.

A typical digitalization process consists of three main tasks:

• Scanning of raw material (e.g., images of book pages)
• Enrichment with metadata (e.g., title, author, pagination, structural units)
• Export of the metadata in XML format as METS/MODS files

A dashboard visualizes the current status of recent digitalization processes:

Once metadata is exported, both metadata and scanned images can be browsed with the accompanying TYPO3 plugin “Kitodo.Presentation”. One example is the digitalized script of Martin Luther from the year of 1544, which can be found in the catalog of the SLUB Dresden.

Used Technologies

The software consists of a Java/Tomcat backend and a web-based PrimeFaces frontend. A MySQL database stores information about users, processes, and tasks. An ElasticSearch index allows searching for processes and tasks based on various metadata. Users register via a Spring-based login function and may upload images using a Samba share.

Scope of Services

During the project, various improvements were implemented:

• Update of the software for Java 11
• Performance improvements of the drag & drop function of the metadata editor
• Performance improvements when adding journal processes
• Extension of the search function with additional filter conditions
• Various improvements of the general usability, e.g., for sorting data

All changes were published as Open Source on GitHub.