Digital Library Projects headspace

We are currently working on the 1990 decade of the Daily Kent Stater, which will be live in the next few weeks. I wanted to write a post about what the work entails for this project, and how many different processes are involved to get a single page posted online. This process involves using three outside vendors once we have prepped the materials for scanning in-house. We use on vendor to create high resolution scans, another vendor to encode the words on each page for a searchable database, and finally another vendor to host the content. Before we publish the content online, I do a spot check of the original scans from the first vendor, as well as a review of the decade on a test site from the hosting vendor. I look for any known issues that we noted during the preparation phase (such as torn pages, mis-numbered issues, inserted materials, etc.). This is a tedious process, but does ensure the quality of the scans online. While I am not able to check every page of the decade, I hav...

This week we rolled out a new face for the digital collections from the Special Collections and Archives department at the University Library. Some of the changes may seem subtle, but they will be crucial ones as we continue to build up our digital collections. Our previous iteration was built on a home-grown service, and had some shortcomings. Our hope with this new interface is to provide a more fluid search and browse experience without losing any of the functionality of the old site. Previously, users were unable to search across all collections, and now we have a way to search three of the five collections. Two collections are hosted by outside vendors, but we are working on a way to also add these to the search functionality. We will also be sharing some important audio files from the May 4 collection in the coming weeks. Stay tuned! http://omeka.library.kent.edu/special-collections/