| Eric C. Weig Director, Digital Library Services University of Kentucky |
Institutions continue to digitize their unique holdings, with the current impetus to get more and more of that archival content online quickly. Traditionally to enable access, this has been a slow process of relating images to finding aids or digitizing a few select items from a collection. Content management systems have often done a poor job in connecting the finding aid to its digitized objects in meaningful ways.
The University of Kentucky has built upon its extensive experience with mass digitization of newspapers and archival description to envision an approach to mass digitization for archival collections. In the past year, the University has developed an open source content management system utilizing the Blacklight discovery software. It has also developed a method for quickly digitizing and loading complete archival collections described with Archivist Toolkit at the item or folder level while seamlessly integrating the finding aid and digital objects together with the assistance of generated METS files.
This session will include a presentation of Kentucky’s new open source content management system as well as an outline of the approach developed to automate all steps in the digitization process beyond image capture and Encoded Archival Description (EAD) creation for archival collections. The automatically generated METS objects will be displayed and discussed as well as a demonstration of additional content encompassed by the new content management system including historic newspapers and oral histories.
Project contributors include Eric Weig, Dr. Michael Slone, Deirdre Scaggs, Mary Molinaro, and Dr. Doug Boyd.