Blue Electrode

Falvey’s Digital Library has just been upgraded with new backend software that will improve its ability to continue growing and improving the online collection. The Digital Library’s first incarnation was launched in August 2006. Over the course of 4 years, the DL’s collection grew to over 9,000 items, and a substantial software functionality wish-list.

• Add support for more file formats, so our collection can include a broader range of materials
• Incorporate an OCR process to facilitate full-text searching of collection content.
• Add support for inclusion of transcriptions with hand-written materials

Our initial software used a variety of technologies to achieve its goal of storing information about digital documents. Unfortunately, not all of these tools worked well together. While the new version of the software retains the METS metadata format and eXist-db XML database, it replaces nearly all of the other components with a suite of more closely-related technologies. The new, all-XML, all-Open-Source framework consists of the following components:

• METS XML schema – Library of Congress standard for describing digital objects.
• eXist-db – Native XML Database
• Orbeon Forms – Java-based XForms engine
• Tesseract – OCR Engine
• VuFind – Online Public Access Catalog

New Key Features:

Root level Document Attachment

Catalogers now have the ability to add document-level items to each object. The most relevant use of this feature is to attach a hand-transcribed, fully annotated companion document to a digitally scanned book. More information on this feature can be found here and a live example can be found by viewing the Lane Manuscript


AJAX-based metadata editor

The Orbeon forms Java-based XForms engine integrates with the YUI JavaScript Library providing a rich user interface for metadata editing.


Document layout and file attachment configurations

The system incorporates a batch-attach routine for adding multiple files (in our case the pages of a scanned book) to a digital object as a single operation. An interface is available to customize the arrangement and location of these files, as well as adding and deleting files when appropriate.


OAI harvestable

OAI/PMH is a standard for serving and harvesting metadata. The Digital Library is now fully harvestable using this standard.


In the coming months we will extend the software to include custom drivers for a VuFind front-end and modularize the metadata editor to support a wide-range of options including Dublin Core, MODS, EAD, and PREMIS support for preservation Metadata.

Our plan is to launch the software as a simple, open-source platform for preservation and presentation of digital collections. So stay tuned! We are targeting April 2011 for the Beta Release.

We are always looking for development partners! If you are interested, please contact us at digitallibrary@villanova.edu

Written by Darren G. Poley, Outreach Librarian, Falvey Memorial Library.

There are several consortia who have for many years been trying to promote the idea and utility of digital collections. The concept of course is simple. Either digitize print material in the public domain or archive digital works that are not under copyright to the end of making works more widely available to the scholarly community via the Web. The Digital Library Federation has worked primarily on standards. The D-Lib Alliance has an online journal and runs workshops. The Association of Research Libraries developed the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC®) which for over a decade has been a major advocacy group for policy change. For Catholic Universities there is the Catholic Research Resources Alliance which is working on preserving access to rare Catholic materials. While membership in these various groups is commendable and their work continues to be necessary recently there have been several turn of events that document the change in the milieu of digital libraries.

Our Cultural Commonwealth [PDF] (2006) from the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences was meant to map out the horizon for greater collaboration. The Ithaka Report, University Publishing in a Digital Age [PDF], released last year forecasts the changing nature of university publishing due to the digital environment in which we now work. The Open Access mandate passed February 2008 by the Arts and Sciences Faculty at Harvard University is a hotly debated effort using institutional weight to promote an opt-out policy that will cause much that would have been less-accessible to be OA available thereby “disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible.” Finally published March 2008, the Research Library Publishing Services [PDF] study that assesses the lay of the land on this front, at least among major research libraries in the United States.
These hallmark statements show that eventually all universities will need to look at their efforts and policies concerning the necessity and viability of digital libraries and how they are an increasingly essential means for more than just reformatting old books. The digital library may very well become the vehicle for preserving a larger and richer deposit of current scholarship.