Baylor University adopts Adam Matthew Digital’s Quartex platform as a robust solution for its diverse special collections program

Baylor University and AM Digital have been partners for many years, with a wide range of the publisher’s digital resources available at the institution. Today’s exciting announcement marks the next phase in the collaboration between the two organizations, with the University having now migrated their entire suite of digital collections to Quartex from OCLC’s CONTENTdm platform.  Some of the collectionspublished today include the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, the Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning Letters and the Frances G. Spencer Collection of American Popular Sheet Music (1700s-1924).

The team at Baylor were looking for a new solution: a turnkey system, with more functionality, an intuitive user interface, and powerful tools to build and publish sites; and in addition, a solution capable of handling the library’s diverse collections, including complex multi-format compound objects. Baylor’s collections will be more discoverable and searchable thanks to built-in Optical Character Recognition, Handwritten Text Recognition, and automated transcription of audio and video files in Quartex.

Following just a  90-minute training session, the team at Baylor were able to begin the process of building their new site and commence the migration of assets from CONTENTdm to Quartex. The migration itself relied onconsistent and effective communication from both Quartex and Baylor teams and even resulted in the collaborative development of new features to support the specific requirements of the content. Those features, focused on audio/visual content,have now been made available to other Quartex users.

The Baylor Libraries currently have almost 2TB of digital collections data, containing nearly 500,000 objects. Consequently, a replacement system had to be sufficiently robust to manage the diverse collections, utilize a modern technological architecture, and provide enough significant improvements over the current system to make the difficult task of collection migration worth the time and effort. We believe the Quartex digital asset management system will meet our needs now, and as we move into the future.

Billie Peterson, Assistant Vice President for Digital Library Services and Systems at Baylor

We’re very pleased that, through Quartex, we can collaborate with Baylor to celebrate and showcase their truly unique content and collections. As we continue to invest in and develop Quartex, it’s wonderful to know that they are going to use the platform’s functionality to the fullest and provide us with important feedback to help shape its evolution.

Khal Rudin, Managing Director of AM Digital

 

The site created by Baylor on the Quartex platform now hosts 62 collections, totalling 950GB of data. This equates to 111,000 assets, 920,000 images and 280,000 minutes of audio.

You can visit the page here: https://digitalcollections-baylor.quartexcollections.com/

For more information about the partnership, please contact Martin Drewe, Head of Customer Experience at Adam Matthew Digital: martin@amdigital.co.uk. 

 About Baylor University 

Baylor University is a private Christian University and a nationally ranked research institution. The University provides a vibrant campus community for more than 17,000 students by blending interdisciplinary research with an international reputation for educational excellence and a faculty commitment to teaching and scholarship. Chartered in 1845 by the Republic of Texas through the efforts of Baptist pioneers, Baylor is the oldest continually operating University in Texas. Located in Waco, Baylor welcomes students from all 50 states and more than 90 countries to study a broad range of degrees among its 12 nationally recognized academic divisions.

The Baylor Libraries lead as an innovative research library that undergirds scholarship, fosters teaching and learning, and builds communities. Comprised of the Central Libraries and world-renowned special collections that include the Armstrong Browning Library, The Texas Collection and University Archives, The Institute for Oral History, the KestonCenter for Religion, Politics, and Society, and the W. R. Poage Legislative Library, the Libraries drive research at Baylor University and beyond.

 About Quartex and Adam Matthew Digital 

Adam Matthew Digital is an award-winning publisher of primary source content with 30 years’ experience identifying and making accessible primary resource collections from leading archives and libraries around the world. The publisher is an independent company within the SAGE Group, based in the United Kingdom, and has offices around the world. As its guiding philosophy, AM Digital believes that at the heart of education is the freedom to think critically. Each year it publishes new, relevant primary source collections that span a wide variety of topics ranging from gender and sexuality, literature, art, politics, war, business, popular culture and more. These curated collections are offered to academic institutions on a customized platform designed to maximize discoverability and drive usage to primary source content to enhance learning.

AM Digital’s experience of curating and showcasing archival collections has informed development of the technology underlying all the collections released, which ensures that customers can effectively discover, access and explore the content published. This technology is made available, as Quartex, to libraries, archives and other heritage institutions, to facilitate digital open access publishing. Quartex is a hosted solution developed by a dedicated and skilled team of engineers. It is designed to support a broad range of repositories’ needs, including academic libraries, public libraries, and historical societies. It benefits from a continual program of investment and development, as new functionality is added to support the requirements of both customers and the AM Digital publishing schedule.

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