Announcing New Features in the Duke Digital Repository

Last week the Duke University Libraries (DUL) development team released a new version of the Duke Digital Repository (DDR), which is the preservation and access platform for digitized, born digital, and purchased library collections. DDR is developed and maintained by DUL staff and it is built using Samvera, Valkyrie and Blacklight components (read all about our migration to Valkyrie which concluded in early 2020).

The primary goal of our new repository features are to provide better support for and access to born digital records. The planning for this work began more than 2 years ago, when the Rubenstein Libraries’ Digital Records Archivist joined the Digital Collections Implementation Team (DCIT) to help us envision how DDR and our workflows could better support born digital collections. Conversations on this topic began between the Rubenstein Library and Digital Strategies and Technology well before that.

Back in 2018, DCIT developed a list of user stories to address born digital records as well as some other longstanding needs. At the time we evaluated each need based on its difficult and impact and then developed a list of high, medium and low priority features.  Fast forward to late 2019, and we designated 3 folks from DCIT to act as product owners during development.  Those folks are our Metadata Architect (Maggie Dickson), Digital Records Archivist ([Matthew] farrell), and me (Head of Digital Collections and Curation Services). Development work began in earnest in Jan/February and now after many meetings, user story refinements, more meetings, and actual development work here we are!

Notable new features include:

• Metadata only view of objects: restrict the object but allow the public to search and discover its metadata
• Expose technical metadata for components in the public interface
• Better access to full text search in CONTENTdm from DDR

As you can see above we were able to fit in a few non-born digital records related features. This is because one of our big priorities is finishing the migration from our legacy Tripod 2 platform to DDR in 2020. One of the impediments to doing so (in addition migrating the actual content) is that Tripod 2 connects with our CONTENTdm instance, which is where we provide access to digitized primary sources that require full text search (newspapers and publications primarily). The new DDR features therefor include enhanced links to our collections in CONTENTdm.

We hope these new features provide a better experience for our users as well as a safe and happy home for our born digital records!