Overview
The Digital Library provides access to locally digitized and born digital special collections. Its collections comprise digitized books, photographs, newspapers, maps, and other research materials. The Digital Library provides two modes of access. The first is to structured collections of materials of a similar type, with comprehensive item-level metadata, such as a collection of digitized photographs of Abraham Lincoln or a set of digitized bound volumes of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. These are most often produced via digitization in the Library’s Digitization Services group. Alternately, the Digital Library provides access to free-form collections of born digital electronic records, often of varied content, frequently with little item-level description, presented via a folder/file browse interface rather than an object list, e.g. the born digital electronic records that the University Archives acquired from the scientist Carl Woese. The Digital Library’s Image collections are IIIF-compliant, and many are made available for harvesting using the OAI-PMH protocol.
Access
Digital Library production site
Digital Library test site (accessible to library staff)
Contact
To submit a general question, request training, or report a system outage, contact: digitalcollections@lists.illinois.edu
Documentation
Please see Managing Digital Collections: A Guide to Local Practice.
Updated and improved documentation coming soon.
Policies
Coming soon.
Publications and Presentations
Rimkus, Kyle R., and Christopher J. Prom. “A Research Interface for Digital Records Using the IIIF Protocol,” May 24, 2018. https://hdl.handle.net/2142/100056.
Rimkus, Kyle R., Kelly J. Applegate, and Jennifer Hain Teper. “Strategic Digital Collection Development in Academic Libraries,” 2015. https://hdl.handle.net/2142/88769.
Rimkus, Kyle R., and William Ingram. “Digital Library Development,” February 10, 2016. https://hdl.handle.net/2142/88894.
Rimkus, Kyle R., and Kelly J. Applegate. “Digital Collections Usage at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library: 2015 Report,” January 28, 2016. https://hdl.handle.net/2142/89704.
Source Code
Source code for the Digital Library is available in the kumquat repository on Github, along with related components available from the broader Medusa Project. In addition, the library also leads the development of the Cantaloupe Image Server, available on Github as the Cantaloupe Project. The Digital Library maintains an ongoing Change Log.