Tag Archives: uapropplat

Announcements, Behind the Scenes, Collections, Digital Collections, Duke Digital Repository

New and Recently Migrated Digital Collections

In the past 3 months, we have launched a number of exciting digital collections!  Our brand new offerings are either available now or will be very soon.  They are:

  • Duke Property Plats: https://repository.duke.edu/dc/uapropplat
  • Early Arabic Manuscripts (included in the recently migrated Early Greek Manuscripts): https://repository.duke.edu/dc/earlymss
  • International Broadsides (added to migrated Broadsides and Ephemera collection): https://repository.duke.edu/dc/broadsides
  • Orange County Tax List Ledger, 1875: https://repository.duke.edu/dc/orangecountytaxlist
  • Radio Haiti Archive, second batch of recordings: https://repository.duke.edu/dc/radiohaiti
  • William Gedney Finished Prints and Contact Sheets (newly re-digitized with new and improved metadata): https://repository.duke.edu/dc/gedney
A selection from the William Gedney Photographs digital collection

In addition to the brand new items, the digital collections team is constantly chipping away at the digital collections migration.  Here are the latest collections to move from Tripod 2 to the Duke Digital Repository (these are either available now or will be very soon):

One of the Greek items in the Early Manuscripts Collection.

Regular readers of Bitstreams are familiar with our digital collections migrations project; we first started writing about it almost 2 years ago when we announced the first collection to be launched in the new Duke Digital Repository interface.  Since then we have posted about various aspects of the migration with some regularity.

What we hoped would be a speedy transition is still a work in progress 2 years later.   This is due to a variety of factors one of which is that the work itself is very complex.  Before we can move a collection into the digital repository it has to be reviewed, all digital objects fully accounted for, and all metadata remediated and crosswalked into the DDR metadata profile.  Sometimes this process requires little effort.   However other times, especially with older collection, we have items with no metadata, or metadata with no items, or the numbers in our various systems simply do not match.  Tracking down the answers can require some major detective work on the part of my amazing colleagues.

Despite these challenges, we eagerly press on.  As each collection moves we get a little closer to having all of our digital collections under preservation control and providing access to all of them from a single platform.  Onward!