Bibliography Among the Disciplines brings together scholarly professionals who are poised to address current problems pertaining to the study of textual artifacts that cross scholarly, pedagogical, professional, and curatorial domains. The conference explores theories and methods common to the object-oriented disciplines, such as anthropology and archaeology, but new to bibliography. The conference program, supported by Rare Book School and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to promote focused cross-disciplinary exchange and future scholarly collaborations.
Digital collection platforms offer a plethora of strengths and weaknesses to those building digital collections. Nearly every platform is less flexible than one wishes it to be, leaving institutions wondering which one will best capture metadata and which one will best display the collection. The University of Iowa Libraries’ Early Manuscripts Project confronted these issues while seeking ways to make materials more discoverable and useful to on-campus and off-campus users.
With self-set goals of improved accessibility; increased discoverability and browsability; global contextualization of early manuscripts, and most importantly, enhanced potential for instruction, the UI Libraries had huge hopes, but one caveat – no development of a new user interface for a collection of fewer than 100 items. The project had to work within existing systems including ArchivesSpace, Alma, ContentDM, Omeka, LibGuides, and WordPress.
This presentation focused on the evolution of the Early Manuscript Project, touching on the various roles of the digital platforms mentioned above as they came together to form a multifaceted digital collection for student scholars and senior researchers.