Posts tagged with William L. Clements Library in Blog The Digital Collections Files

Digital Content & Collections (DCC) relies on content and subject experts to bring us new digital collections.From July 2018 to Jun 2019, our digital collections received 67.9 million views. During the pandemic, when there was an increased need for digital resources, usage of the digital collections jumped to 86.5 million views (July 2019-Jun 2020) and 89 million views (July 2020-June 2021). Thank you to the many people, too numerous to reasonably list here, who are involved not just in the creation of these digital collections but in the continued maintenance of these and hundreds of other digital collections that reach users around the world to advance research and provide access to materials.

This project's intent was to catalog, digitize, and present a selection of bird's-eye prints of American cities held by the Clements Library. The library started collecting bird's-eye views in earnest during the tenure of current director, J. Kevin Graffagnino. Looking for an innovative and unique way to display these views, Corey Schmidt, under the supervision of the Curator of Graphics Material, Clayton Lewis, began working to build an interactive display for these views. Schmidt worked with a mapping system called Leaflet. Leaflet is an open-source, interactive display (JavaScript library) for maps and geographic data. Because the Image Bank already contained the metadata for each view, Schmidt wrote a program that searched through the Image Bank API and retrieved this data, which was then used with Leaflet's map display to create the map found on their online exhibit.