Moving to AM Quartex: University of Delaware’s migration of digital collections
In the first of a guest blog series, Theresa Hessey, Digital Collections Librarian, Digital Initiatives and Preservation Department at the University of Delaware, shares the background to the university library's decision to migrate its many-faceted, multimedia digital collections to AM Quartex.
The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press houses numerous unique and valuable collections that are used by members of the campus community and researchers worldwide. The Library, Museums and Press began our digitisation programme in 2004 in a very ad hoc manner, with little to no substantial planning for future growth. Since that time, our digital collections have been presented in a variety of platforms including multiple custom built web pages.
MSS0947 Historic Map collection, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, Newark, Delaware.
For the past decade, our digital collections have been split between two platforms; Artstor for our image-based and Museums collections and DSpace (institutionally branded as UDSpace) for many of our manuscript and text-based collections. In multiple instances, portions of the same manuscript collection were presented in both platforms (i.e. a photograph series in Artstor and correspondence series in UDSpace). This division has proved to be confusing and frustrating to staff and users alike and has almost certainly hindered the usage of our digital collections.
Following the announcement of the retirement of the Artstor digital platform in August 2024, a Platform Exploratory Group (PEG) was convened in February 2023. PEG brought together staff across the Library, Museums and Press who work with our digital collections to explore digital platforms that best meet our needs for storing content and making it available and discoverable to researchers. The group concluded to recommended adopting AM Quartex and the administration supported our recommendation.
GRA0139 Willard Stewart photographs of Delaware, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, Newark, Delaware.
The adoption of AM Quartex as our digital collections platform will allow us to present our digital collections in a much more dynamic and robust manner and will enhance access to our digitised materials.
Quartex will also provide greater visibility for our Museums collections. By providing access to all Museums digital collections via a single URL, we can present the seven collections in a unique environment that makes them more discoverable. Users will be able to easily browse and search Museums collections in a separate digital environment from Library materials but we will also be able to customise metadata to better reflect the unique nature of Museums collections.
The implementation of Quartex will also provide the Library, Museums and Press much more flexibility in the presentation of our digital collections and will increase access and discoverability to our important and unique resources while supporting our institution branding, providing consistency across Library, Museum and Press websites.
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