The Digital Library Production Service or DLPS (part of our MLibrary Library Information Technology division) has created and hosted a very large number of digital collections over the last 10+ years. We have been working for many years to integrate those collections into MLibrary services, and we are now ready to present the next link in this chain-- a more easily navigable and more fully featured list of these collections.
The road to building this collection list has been long and sometimes difficult. Four years ago, Suzanne Chapman and John Weise discovered the Exhibit tool (part of the SIMILE set of tools from MIT Libraries). They worked through many of the initial hurdles regarding how, where, and what we host using this tool. After a languishing period, it was revitalized by Kat Hagedorn, Jose Blanco, Roger Espinosa and Saurabh Koparkar to its current state. We would not have gotten half so far without two ULAs who kindly volunteered their services to help categorize, describe and find image thumbnails for each collection-- Ellen Wilson and Lorelei Rutledge. Many hearty thanks to all involved in the process of putting this tool together.
The new collection list replaces the the old, which was created originally to gather administrative information about each collection, including the responsible party, and statistics about size and usage. Public discovery and usage of the list was not intended nor anticipated, but the list became a popular public access point for DLPS collections. The old list can still be seen. Better, no?