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A stellar day for Villanova’s Digital Library

Thursday, January 20th 2011,  was quite a day for the Digital Library: the incorporation of Digital Library data into VuFind – and this is not just the metadata but the full indexing of all OCR’ed content, pdf files from transcriptions and faculty publications.  This of course brings all of the functionality and power of VuFind to the Digital Library content including all of the social features and best of all – high quality searching.  In addition to this, the Google sitemaps to Digital Library content were published so all Digital Library content will again be findable – after a 3 year hiatus – directly from Google.  It also marks the final tweaking of the latest software back-end rewrite from David Lacy – we are back in full operation since a break in November for software deployment and testing.  Transcripts for handwritten materials that have been archived for over 4 years are finally being wedded to the images and of course it is all findable using VuFind.  These software deployments have been eagerly awaited for years!

So a hearty round of Kudos to Dave Lacy, Demian Katz, and Dave Uspal.   They have worked tirelessly to make these enhancements possible and have been excited about the developments too!  They are working hard to bring VuDL to birth and so share this robust toolset with the library and archives communities!  Indeed there are a large number of enhancements and tweaks that will increase the utility of the software that are in development.

Other items on Thursday of interest are: the highly positive news about a possible development / testing partner for VuDL;   a request from another maritime museum about possible partnership;  a request from a Princeton scholar for a Digital Library photograph for a new book on Irish nationalists to be published by Princeton in December 2011,  and of course, an article in the latest ACRL News about our La Salle partnership!

From last week we had some other fantastic news:  two new partnerships – the modest partnership with the Sisters of the Order of Saint Basil the Great, and dramatically the Philadelphia Ceili Group. We will be digitizing the audio and video of the Ceili Group’s meetings and performances of Irish Musicians from their historic archive – who knows what content and performers we will find on these tapes!  And we will also be working with the Library of Congress to obtain the master tapes for years that Villanova University currently does curate.   Stephen Spatz will be acting as our point person for this project due to his skill and interest in all things musical.

I am so very positive about our future progress and our outstanding staff that works so very well together!


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Last Modified: January 21, 2011

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