The Digital Collections Files

The Michigan Daily Digital Archives is a joint collaboration between the University of Michigan Library IT division, Michigan Daily, and the Bentley Historical Library. The Michigan Daily Digital Archives provides searchable access to over 300 volumes, 23,000 issues of digitized student newspaper, from 1891 through 2014. New volumes of the newspaper will be added in the future as they become available. The Library IT team developed a robust discovery interface for the archives. The team made the choice of building a discovery system instead of using an out of the box application or vended solutions. The development team followed Scrum-like Agile approach for website development.

Lately I’ve been looking back through the past of the Digital Library Production Service (DLPS) -- in fact, all the way back to the time before DLPS, when we were the Humanities Text Initiative -- to see what, if anything, we’ve learned that will help us as we move forward into a world of Hydra, ArchivesSpace, and collaborative development of repository and digital resource creation tools.

We talk about using Google Analytics in DLPS and HathiTrust, and how the Analytics interface will have changed before you've finished this sentence.

The Digital Library Production Service (DLPS) recently did a thoughtful and comprehensive update of its web presence on the University of Michigan Library website. This post summarizes the process and calls out the value of having a web content strategist in the mix.

(by Kat Hagedorn, Christina Powell, Lance Stuchell and John Weise) The one constant in digital preservation over the past couple of decades has been change. Digitization standards have changed as equipment has improved and become more affordable, formats have come and gone, and tools have been developed to help with automated format creation and validation. The progress made on this front has been great, but how do we reconcile older content with current digitization and preservation standards?

The last visual refresh to the DLPS Image Class environment updated the layout and styles, but mostly worked the same way. Starting this year, we've been making more drastic changes. These updates were based on what our analytics showed about browser use (larger, wider screens and of course, mobile use) and conversations with collection managers.

As the creators of DLXS, we're quite impressed with the adaptation of Text Class by NLM/NIH to provide access to oral histories.

The Digital Library Production Service (DLPS) 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.