David Kennedy
Systems Programmer
Duke University
Duke University Libraries’ Digital Collections currently boast more than 30 distinct collections of digital content. The collections represent a variety of subject areas, contain different media types, and they are delivered through a discovery layer which allows users to find and interact with the content. Duke has made the management of these collections a priority. To that end, staff has been making organizational and technical infrastructure changes in order to streamline the digitization and description workflows as well as lower the cost of ownership and management of a fully featured digital repository.
Platform-independent tools and interfaces have been in development for managing the digitization, description and publishing workflows of digital collections. In order for the tools to be sustainable, they should appeal to the broader library community and be extensible to meet diverse needs. A range of metadata schemes, content models, business practices, workflows and repository implementations are planned. The goal is to eventually release the tools to the community as an open source project.
This presentation will focus on the design process, how user-centered design techniques have been incorporated into all aspects of design. It will include discussion of the modular system architecture, the creation of a generalized Web services application programming interface (API), and the use of Fedora, SOLR, and Django framework, as well as how metadata profile definitions drive the metadata creation and repository business logic. It will also include discussion of how the tools are extensible to meet digital library needs.
