Since 2014, staff from the Hagley Library have been busy planning and implementing a significant upgrade to our online digital archives. The digital archives site -- located at digital.hagley.org -- includes a selection of digitized material from the library and makes it available to researchers around the world via the internet. Since the site launched in 2008, we have added approximately 400,000 items (photographs, manuscripts, publications, etc.) and have had three-quarters of a million people access over 5 million pages on the site. This is an unprecedented use of the fabulous collections we house here at Hagley in Wilmington, Delaware.
After extensive research, the staff of the former Digital Collection Department (now Audiovisual and Digital Collections) decided that a software called Islandora, an open source content management system developed at the University of Prince Edward Island, would be our next platform. Starting in 2015, we began a massive data cleanup and inventory project to prepare our digital collections for migration to a new system. We recently completed that part of the project and have started adding content to Hagley’s Islandora site.
Significant progress has been made in recent months and we plan to launch the new site this summer. We will announce a specific launch date on our twitter feed (@hagley_digital) as soon as it’s determined. The new site will be much faster than the current site and Hagley staff will have more control over improving the search functionality. The tools used by Islandora for sharing books and other text-based sources are similar to the ones used at the Internet Archive so they should be familiar to many in our research community. In addition, the new platform will give us the capacity to efficiently make our sound and moving picture content available. We are really excited to share the new and improved digital archives and look forward to receiving and acting on user feedback.
There have been many people involved with this project up this point. We would like to thank Abby Adams, our former Digital Archivist, for spearheading the early stages of the project. Angela Schad did much of the heavy lifting required for the data cleanup and her contribution has been invaluable. We recently added Mike Demers, our new Digital Asset Coordinator, who has experience working with Islandora at his previous position at the Florida Virtual Campus supporting academic libraries in the University System of Florida. Mike will play a critical role in the final push towards launching the site and will be our resident expert on Islandora going forward.
Kevin Martin is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Audiovisual and Digital Collections at the Hagley Library