Paul Joseph
Systems Librarian
University of British Columbia
Bronwen Sprout
Head, Digital Programs and Services
University of British Columbia
Open Collections is a discovery and delivery service developed by University of British Columbia (UBC) Library as an innovative approach to providing access to the Library’s managed and curated digital objects. Open Collections was born out of an idea to provide unified indexing, discovery and access to the Library’s digital objects, regardless of the repository the objects are managed in. The Library currently utilizes CONTENTdm, DSpace, AtoM and Dataverse for managing its digital objects. Rather than embarking on a project to consolidate repositories to a new framework like Hydra or Islandora, the Library chose to develop a service that improves discovery and delivery of both metadata and the digital objects to researchers and the general public. This presentation will cover the genesis of Open Collections, the development of the aggregated metadata model and unified Elasticsearch index, the suite of discovery and delivery services via the Open Collections API, and the next steps for Open Collections and UBC Library.
