As one of the major deliverables of the Digital Library Program (DLP) strategic initiative, we’ve been building a new comprehensive digital repository platform to manage and provide long term access to unique and rare digital assets, whether they are digitized physical materials, or existing digital material acquired from donors or submitted by researchers and students on campus.
Our repository is built on the Samvera community-sourced platform, with our infrastructure hosted by AWS@Emory. We’re going live with a beta preview of our public-facing front end product, Emory Digital Collections, at https://digital.library.emory.edu on April 29. Over 12,000 digital objects will be available at time of launch, the majority of which can be accessed by the public; some objects are restricted to the Emory community only.
Our teams have been hard at work since early 2019 to deliver version 1.0 of our new repository. To develop the first two products in our roadmap, we’ve had two Scrum development teams working in parallel. The product development teams consist of engineers and product managers from Library Technology & Digital Strategies and Middleware/DevOps: Collin Brittle, Nik Dragovic, Solomon Hilliard, Devanshu Matlawala, Mark Prefer, Will Ulman, Brad Watson, and Alex Zotov. We also partnered with Data Curation Experts, a Samvera framework consultancy, who have built highly customized bulk ingest and access controls solutions for us and paired with us to fast-track the development of our front-end product. This Herculean effort has been expertly managed by Tiffany Miles from the PMO, with additional support from Stephanie Rodgers.
We are grateful for the input and support from many colleagues across the Libraries and LITS including the project’s Migration Team and Core Team, which include representatives from the Rose Library, Oxford College Library, Health Sciences Library, Digitization and Digital Curation, Metadata Services, and Research, Engagement, and Scholarly Communications (RESC). We also appreciate the accommodations and assistance from additional LITS teams including, but not limited to, the Project Management Office, Middleware, the AWS@Emory team, Security, Identity Management, DBAs, and Networking, all of whom have helped us get up and running during Emory’s larger cloud transition.
In the months ahead, we’ll collect feedback from users and continue to refine the products and finalize version 1.0 functionality. We also have much more unique and fascinating content to bring online and will continue to load data on an ongoing basis. Our long-term repository roadmap has many new features planned and we look forward to continuing to expand the repository in the years ahead.
For more information about the larger initiative and our technical infrastructure, visit our Digital Library Program space on the LITS wiki: https://wiki.service.emory.edu/display/DLPP.
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