About the Digital Collections Repository

The UVa Library digital library management and delivery system. The Digital Collections Repository contains images of art and architecture, and electronic texts, almost all of which include full text and page images. New content is added monthly, and will eventually include other formats such as finding aids, printed music, video, datasets, audio, and GIS. A tool called Collectus is available for users to save personal collections from the Repository, generate web pages and slide shows, and manipulate images.

Explore the Digital Collections Repository.

Blacklight

Blacklight is UVa’s Lucene/Solr based faceted browsing and search interface experiment. This tool is designed to allow users to more easily filter content and build queries that are highly focused and reusable, resulting in more accurate results with less effort and frustration.  It takes advantage of the rich metadata in the bibliographic records and structured XML objects. Constraints based on browse facets can be used to narrow results, and results are ranked by relevance as they are displayed.

Collectus Digital Object Collector Tool

The UVa Library's Collectus digital object collector tool allows users to to collect image or text objects from a repository. The objects are collected as http pointer references to a Repository that are stored as an XML file on any location selected by a user. The Object Collection Window in Collectus allows a user to view and organize newly created or previously saved object collections, and to generate slide shows for use in the classroom or HTML pages for delivery of the collections. The ImageViewer in Collectus provides zooming, panning, brightness and contrast, and rotating functions for images in collections.

October 15, 2007: A New Version of the Collectus Digital Object Collector Tool source code is available for download.

Fedora™

Flexible and Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture (Fedora™), the underlying infrastructure for the UVa Library's Digital Library Repository, developed jointly by the UVa Library and the Cornell Digital Library Research Group.

March 31, 2008: Version 3.0 beta 1 and Version 2.2.2 of Fedora™ are available for download through the Fedora Commons web site.

GDMS

General Descriptive Modeling Scheme (GDMS), a formal information structure to construct descriptive models for collections of digital resources developed by the UVa Library.

LibX UVa Library Firefox Toolbar

The UVa Library now has a toolbar for the Firefox browser built using LibX. You can search Virgo as well as our ejournal list, WorldCat.org and Google Scholar. LibX will also put the little orange Rotunda on pages from Amazon, the NYT Book Review, and other sources linking to a Virgo search. If you highlight a term on a Web page and then right-click, you'll get a menu of search options. Try the function where you can highlight the title in a citation on a Web page or in a PDF and drag it onto the Scholar button -- you'll be taken directly to the full text resource if we have it!

Music Encoding Initiative

The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) DTD is an XML DTD for the representation and exchange of music information. It is designed to be comprehensive, that is, it provides ways to encode data from all the separate domains, i.e. logical, visual, gestural (performance), and analytical, commonly associated with music. In addition, the DTD accommodates bibliographic description that is required for archival uses. It also addresses relationships between elements, cooperative creation and editing of music markup, navigation within the music structure as well as to external multimedia entities, the inclusion of custom symbols, etc.

OpenURL Resolver and Metasearch

A Resolver uses the OpenURL standard to locate journals and articles. Find@UVA Journal Finder is the UVA resolver that can be used to locate e-journals and e-newspapers through citations. Seventy percent of UVa's current indexing and abstracting tools support the OpenURL standard that makes this service possible, and journal titles from various collections as well as individually subscribed items are constantly added to the Resolver knowledge base. The UVa Library's Article Finder is linked from a button in over 90 licensed indexing and abstracting services representing over 40,000 journal titles. See the "OpenURL in 60 Seconds" page for an introduction.

OneSearch is a metasearch or federated search tool that can search multiple online resources at the same time -- not just different resources, but different kinds of resources, so for your topic you can look for books and videos in Virgo, articles in Web of Science or Factiva, facts in the Britannica, and pictures in the AP Photo Archive . The results link either directly to or through Find@UVa to the information, the journal or encyclopedia article, the picture, or the Virgo record.

Supporting Digital Scholarship

The Supporting Digital Scholarship project has completed its third year and issued its final report. The project was developed jointly by Library and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) to investigate the implications of collecting digital scholarly projects into a digital library, and funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The premise of the project is that scholars, given the resources and the support needed, create digital projects that are more like virtual museum exhibitions than like books. These projects usually include large collections of digital versions of primary resources with a network of complex interrelationships interwoven with original scholarly commentary. A number of Library staff participated in both the Technical and the Policy committees. The final report is available at http://www.iath.virginia.edu/sds/SDS_AR_2003.html. The report discusses the technical problems encountered in collecting selections from the Rossetti Archive (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/rossetti/), the Salisbury Project (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/salisbury/), the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library (http://www.thdl.org/), and the Pompeii Forum Project (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pompeii/), and policy implications for the Library in collecting such projects.

User Collection Tool

The User Collection Tool is a web-based application developed using MySQL and PHP by the Digital Media Lab at the Robertson Media Center for the management, organization, and annotation of personal media collections (images, video, audio, etc.) from any web browser in any location. The Tool can be used to organize media into different categories, enter and maintain metadata about the media files, publish galleries on the Web, and export XML files in the UVa GDMS format.