Digital Collections at Duke University Libraries

Digital Collections at Duke University Libraries
Aery, Sean , sean.aery@duke.edu Duke University,
Sexton, Will, will.sexton@duke.edu Duke University,
The digitization of primary sources for humanities research marks one of the important ways that the emergence of a digital culture has transformed libraries, special collections, and other cultural heritage organizations. The last fifteen years have seen a wide range of initiatives among both small and large organizations to expose unique artifacts, including manuscripts, still photographs, film, audio and print. The practice of digitizing primary sources has come to be known in the vernacular of the library profession as “digital collections.”

Staff at Duke University Libraries have collaborated during the last part of 2010 on re-imagining, re-engineering and re-implementing the web application by which the library provides discovery and access for its digital collections. Our work plan targets January of 2011 as a release date for the remade interface. As part of an outreach effort to the research and education communities that comprise the target audience for this application, we propose a poster and demo presentation at Digital Humanities ‘11.

For the development team at Duke, the project has presented an opportunity to think in depth about the landscape in which we publish our digital collections. The application that we seek to replace went live in January 2008, after an in-house development process that was expedited to head off the decommissioning of hardware. Since that time, we have considered how a more measured development process might enable us to upgrade the user experience.

We went through a lengthy process of gathering feedback from users and stakeholders of the existing digital collections site. We analyzed other libraries’ digital collections efforts, content-focused sites like Flickr and Youtube, and retail sites like Netflix, Amazon and Zappos. We also gave considerable thought to the ways that open API’s, social networking and concepts such as linked data transform the ways that students, instructors and researchers experience online resources.

Project manager Sean Aery has written extensively about the project and included many screenshots of the new page design on the library’s Digital Collections Blog. His postings outline the research-heavy approach that we took in developing the interface design. In addition, we have worked to incorporate linked data concepts into the underlying representation of collections metadata. One of the objectives for this project is to develop an open API for the collections, to foster the development of applications by interested users. Presenting the framework to digital humanities scholars will prove invaluable in meeting this last objective. [See the http://library.duke.edu/blogs/digital-collections/category/website-redesign/].

One of the key decisions in our process was the choice to decouple the digital collections interface from other elements of our digital collections infrastructure. The application is a standalone framework developed in the Django platform, with Solr to provide the faceted searching functionality, and a mechanism for synchronizing data from other components. The decoupling of this application from tools for developing and managing content allows the development team to work in short, iterative cycles, free from dependencies on other aspects of the program’s technology infrastructure.

A significant selection of advertising-related materials from one of Duke’s collection centers, the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History.
Important documentary photography collections such as the Sidney D. Gamble Photographs of early-twentieth-century China.
Many rare books not available in other venues.
Finally, and critically, all of these processes, decisions and source code updates have come in the service of a great body of important and compelling content for humanities researchers. Much of the material is housed in Duke’s Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, one of the world’s leading libraries of its kind. Digitized collections include:

Duke has a very active Digital Production Center, and we plan to publish a wide variety of new and compelling materials in the first quarter of the new year. All of the content is freely available for educators, students and researchers.

Our process of learning from our users and patrons does not end with the release of the new platform. We want to learn about ways we can improve the quality of the collections and the experience. Our goal is to make the digital collections a premier resource for research and learning in the humanities and social sciences. Digital humanities scholars comprise one of our important target audiences, and the DH11 conference provides us an important opportunity to engage in the discussion around this field of study.