Meta-Issue: Supporting Multiple Metadata Profiles

[dannylamb]

This is a meta issue to track developing support for multiple metadata profiles. Please refer to this issue in any subsequent issue to link them.

Islandora CLAW is extremely configurable, and we know that it can support multiple metadata profiles, but we've yet to document, describe, or otherwise determine a best practice for doing so. Most of our efforts have been focused on determining a reasonable "default" metadata profile, mostly geared towards 7.x users with MODS. So there are a lot of still unanswered/open questions.

• What about users with Dublin Core terms or PBCore?
• How can one use as much community provided solutions as possible without coming from MODS.
• How best can objects with two metadata profiles live side by side within a single Islandora?

A large majority of these can be answered with documentation, but we need real user experiences to help drive what message we convey to our users about this.

[bryjbrown]

As someone who used nodes to model submissions before turning them into Islandora objects in 7.x, I'll point out that one major flaw of using content types is that once you have configured the content type's fields and made at least one node of that type, your metadata profile is VERY hard to change at the system level. I'm not sure if this is still the case in Drupal 8, but its caused us a lot of trouble because, in a healthy repository, your metadata profile is always slightly changing to remove fields that weren't as useful as you thought they would be, or adding new fields that a user can facet on.

I propose that, in addition to figuring out how to support multiple metadata profiles in parallel, we also investigate how to make it easy for admins to UPDATE their metadata profiles without breaking Drupal's expectation of completely static fields on content types.

[rosiel]

As a site administrator, I would like to be able to apply my previous knowledge of Drupal in some way that allows me to specify metadata views by object type, collection type, etc to provide for the variance in objects across my repository.