From content silos to an integrated digital library

Conrad, Anders

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From content silos to an integrated digital library

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The Royal Library was very fast to adapt the emerging web technologies in the mid 1990’s. The web was used as an integrated part of digitization projects, resulting in a number of specially tailored web sites for various types of content

manuscripts, images, literary texts, journal articles, etc. Each project and type of material would typically result in its own data model, metadata format, workflow, and a database/repository that was tightly coupled with the web application. In later years, as the throughput on the digitization production lines has increased, more automated ways of dissemination have been developed. However this has not been able to fundamentally replace the tendency to building silos around different types of content. Being both national and university library, we can expect that in the future accessioned material will largely be born digital. In order to handle this situation, we have decided to start implementing an integrated digital library infrastructure, covering all aspects of digital collection building and management. The assumptions are that some metadata will be shared between all types of digital materials, and that the main steps in a digital object life-cycle will be common for all object types. In my presentation I am going to show how we are building a technical infrastructure in support of this, using building blocks such as Hydra, Fedora Commons, Solr, and Blacklight. I will also be touching on the organizational side of the project, focusing on the challenges to both IT people and collections staff in this process of change.

A presentation to the EOD Conference held at the National Library of Technology, Prague, Czech Republic, 17-18 October 2013. Abstract

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