When Grant Mandarino arrived at The Evergreen State College as College Archivist in early 2024, he stepped into a digital collections environment that worked—but required more upkeep than Evergreen could reasonably sustain without dedicated technical staff.
Most of the college’s digitized materials lived in Omeka, which had been an accessible and flexible way to get collections online. Item-level metadata was generally solid, and a significant amount of digitization work had already been done. At the same time, Omeka was being used both as a stand-in digital asset management system, and as a platform for building digital exhibitions. Over time, those uses became increasingly complex and difficult to sustain, with multiple customizations supporting them.
As Grant put it, “I could have learned how to customize it, but I’m the only archivist here, and that work would have come at the expense of actually doing archival work.” With limited staff capacity and heavy reliance on student workers, continuing to patch and maintain the existing setup no longer felt sustainable.
Rather than trying to rebuild the system in place, Evergreen chose to consolidate and migrate its digital collections to JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services. The decision wasn’t about changing how collections looked, but about ensuring they could be preserved and sustained with the staff Evergreen had.
This case study documents Evergreen’s migration from Omeka to JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services, focusing on why the move was timely, how the migration unfolded, and what changed once the work was complete.
Usable collections, fragile infrastructure
By the time Grant arrived, Evergreen’s challenge was not getting collections online—years of prior work and grant-funded digitization had already produced a substantial volume of digital material—but sustaining those collections responsibly, with limited staff and growing stewardship obligations.
The systems supporting Evergreen’s digital collections had evolved to meet immediate needs: enabling access, supporting exhibitions, and providing a working system of record. That flexibility made progress possible early on, but over time it also introduced ongoing maintenance demands that were increasingly difficult to absorb, and made it clear that a different stewardship model was needed.
As Grant described it: “For what we needed at the time, it made sense. But it requires a lot of upkeep if you want things to look and function the way you imagine.”
As the sole archivist, supported by student workers whose availability shifted quarter to quarter, Grant had to make careful choices about where to spend time and attention. Continuing to invest in customizing and stabilizing a locally managed environment would have meant less capacity for description, teaching, and stewardship work itself.
Preservation needs added urgency. Evergreen held several terabytes of digitized material, including audio recordings created through a recent grant-funded project. While these materials were accessible, they were not yet housed within a preservation environment designed to monitor integrity, manage risk, and support long-term care.
The challenge, then, was recognizing that Evergreen’s collections had reached a level of scale and importance that required a more sustainable, supported stewardship mode —one that reduced maintenance burden while strengthening preservation confidence.
Preservation first, supported migration
As Grant evaluated options, he focused on finding a solution that fit Evergreen’s size, staffing model, and stewardship obligations. A solution designed to support sustainable stewardship, rather than ongoing system maintenance.
Pricing transparency played an early role. Other digital asset management vendors required multiple exploratory meetings before costs or feasibility became clear; with JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services, scope and pricing were understandable from the outset, making it easier to evaluate fit early.
That transparency “made a big difference,” allowing Grant to bring supervisors in early and say, “This is what it does, and this is what it costs.”
Familiarity mattered too. JSTOR was already a trusted part of Evergreen’s academic ecosystem, helping the service feel like an extension of existing work rather than a risky departure.
Another big selling point was that so many members of our community—both students and faculty—are already familiar with JSTOR.
“Another big selling point was that so many members of our community—both students and faculty—are already familiar with JSTOR.”
Ultimately, preservation was the deciding factor.
As Grant described it, large portions of Evergreen’s digitized audio lacked a clear long-term preservation path:
“We had terabytes of digitized audio just sitting in cloud storage. We didn’t have a true preservation system, and there was no realistic way we could afford one on our own at the scale required.”
Evergreen selected Tier 3 of JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services to match this preservation reality—and particularly for the large volumes of digitized audio and other materials Grant did not plan to actively work with, but wanted to secure for the long term through Portico’s trusted digital preservation infrastructure.
Tier 3 also includes access to JSTOR Seeklight, an AI-assisted collections processing tool Grant viewed as future capacity rather than an immediate need. With a strong student workforce in place, Evergreen prioritized preservation first, knowing that additional description and remediation support was already built in as collections grow or staffing patterns change.
The migration process: Handled with care, and faster than expected
For their move to Stewardship, Evergreen engaged JSTOR‘s professional migration services, which was designed to reduce institutional burden, and make complex transitions predictable and manageable for small teams.
Planning and scoping
The process began with early engagement—even before the contract was finalized—allowing JSTOR’s Participant Success team to assess feasibility and surface potential risks ahead of time.
After a kickoff meeting in mid‑September 2025, Grant completed a straightforward scoping spreadsheet identifying which collections should migrate, how they were structured, and how metadata should map into the new environment.
Not everything in Omeka needed to move. Some materials were tightly bound to legacy exhibitions; others were no longer priorities. “The trickiest part,” he noted, “was just deciding what was worth migrating.”
Division of labor
From Evergreen’s side, the migration was largely hands-off, but included three basic steps:
- Completing the scoping spreadsheet
- Answering a small number of clarifying questions
- Participating in one follow‑up meeting
JSTOR handled the technical execution—harvesting files and metadata, converting and mapping records, ingesting content, and supporting review.
On timing, Grant had expected a much longer process: “I expected this to take months. They gave me a conservative estimate of around two months; it was done in about three weeks.”
I expected this to take months. They gave me a conservative estimate of around two months; it was done in about three weeks.
Built-in flexibility
Throughout the process, the JSTOR Participant Success team stayed closely involved. Importantly, decisions made during migration weren’t permanent.
Grant emphasized that the process was designed to be flexible, supported by an intuitive, cloud-based DAM environment that makes it easy to edit, reorganize, and expand collections over time: “Even if you decide later that something should be structured differently, you can change where everything ends up pretty easily.”
The results: Scale, speed, and reduced burden
Evergreen’s migration produced clear, practical outcomes:
- All prioritized Omeka collections successfully migrated into JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services
- 4,897 items across 15 collections were added, including PDFs, JPEGs, and preservation‑grade TIFFs
- It took approximately 15-20 business days from active migration start to completion
- Migration is offered on an at-cost, nonprofit basis, designed to reflect effort rather than margin
Just as important as the numbers was what Evergreen didn’t have to do. The migration avoided significant staff time that would otherwise have been spent extracting, restructuring, and re‑uploading content manually.
Instead, Grant was able to focus on improving metadata quality, onboarding student workers, and planning future collections—the work that actually advances stewardship.
What’s possible now: Stewardship with confidence
With preservation and migration in place, Evergreen has access to JSTOR Seeklight as part of its ongoing stewardship toolkit—providing additional capacity for metadata creation or remediation as needs evolve, without requiring a separate system or workflow change.
And with migration complete, Evergreen’s day-to-day work has shifted. The focus is no longer on keeping systems running, but on making collections better.
Grant is continuing metadata cleanup where needed, training students within a stable environment, and building new collections directly in JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services. One large archival collection has already been published on JSTOR, with additional collections planned as metadata work progresses.
Preservation is no longer an open question. Materials Evergreen wants to share, or simply safeguard, now live within a unified, trusted stewardship environment.
With JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services, preservation workflows are integrated directly into the platform, allowing Evergreen to initiate Portico-backed preservation as part of normal collection management, without managing separate systems, technical coordination, or complex handoffs.
For Grant, the most meaningful outcome isn’t a single feature or metric. It’s confidence.
Asked what he would tell a peer at a similar institution, Grant didn’t hesitate: “It’s a low-hurdle, seamless process. Most of it is done for you. And even if you don’t get everything right the first time, you’re not locked in.”
For institutions weighing whether migration is worth the risk, Evergreen’s experience shows that with the right partner, migration doesn’t have to be disruptive. It can be the foundation for sustainable, future-ready stewardship.
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