York Digital Library (YODL)

York Digital Library

The Digital Library is a project to build a University-wide Digital Library service for multimedia resources used in or created out of teaching, research and study at the University. The initial project phase runs August 2007 to July 2010, after which we will be transitioning to a service. The aim is to complement both the university's research publications held in White Rose Research Online and the digital teaching materials in the University's Yorkshare VLE.

YODL beta

York Digital Library (YODL) is currently in beta development and has been made available to colleagues in the History of Art Department.  It contains digital images to support the History of Art Department (these images have to be access controlled for use by the Department only), and a number of smaller image collections made available across the University.  This is set to grow with the following (among others):

  • Streamed music from the York Sound Archive.
  • Images from the King's Manor slide collections, including the Institute for Advanced Architectural Studies (IAAS) and the Morgan Collection
  • Images from individual acadmic staff within History of Art
  • Stained Glass images by Painton Cowen
  • Images from the Department of Archaeology slide collections
  • Audio from the Department of Language and Linguistics
  • Images from the Vickers Collection in the Borthwick Institute for Archives
  • A collection of family papers from the Borthwick Institute for Archives
  • Video from the Department of Theatre, Film and Television

SAFIR

The first phase of YODL (Aug 2007-Dec 2008) was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under the name SAFIR (Sound Archives Film Images Repository). This was successfully completed at the end of 2008. The result was 'YODL beta' and a number of documents. Further information can be found in the following:

YODL-ING

Following on from SAFIR, we have successfully bid for further JISC funding for an 'enhancement' project, called York Digital Library – Integration for the Next Generation (YODL-ING).  YODL-ING will use technology to enhance and embed repositories into the information infrastructure of the University of York and will offer re-usable solutions and recommendations for the wider HE, JISC and Fedora communities.  Working with project partners, YODL-ING will build two significant services. One will utilise the SWORD protocol to expedite deposit into a number of repositories from a single deposit interface.  The other will offer a simple, yet scalable solution to access control, enabling the expression of policies in machine-readable format and utilising Shibboleth to control access to users at York and at any other Higher Education institution.  Crucial to this is that we maintain the ability to offer a hybrid repository, where access controlled content is managed alongside open access resources.  The project will also explore tools, semantic approaches and web services to enhance metadata generation, using “crowd intelligence” approaches, combined with existing workflows.  Work on accessibility will ensure the widest possible support for users and a study of digital preservation will facilitation preservation strategy planning for the long-term.

Technology

YODL is underpinned by the Fedora open source repository software platform. This provides the storage and management of resources. The user interface and access control mechanisms are currently provided by the open source Muradora software. 

Resources

We have produced the following public documents:

Roadmap

We have various pieces of work in progress, in addition to the collections listed above:

  • workflows for audio and video
  • more images from History of Art
  • enhancements and new features for the YODL interface
  • digitised manuscripts in YODL, with page-turner software
  • access control for YODL, including logging in with university id/password
  • software upgrades
  • a pilot project to look at electronic key text delivery

Give us your stuff

Please get in touch if you have any collections which might be included in the Digital Library. We can't promise to put things in immediately, but we can talk to you about your resources and requirements, give advice and add to our list of collections for future inclusion.

Digital Library news

For project news see the York Digital Library blog

Contacts

Julie Allinson (Project Manager)
JB Morrell Library, University of York
Telephone: (01904) 434083
Email: ja546

Peri Stracchino (Digital Library Systems Developer/Administrator)
Email: ps552

Yankui Feng (Digital Library Systems Developer)
Email: yf508

Lucy Jaques (Digital Library Officer)
Email: lj526

Matthew Herring (Digital Library Officer)
Email: mh43

Paul Shields (Photographer)

Helen Savage (Digitisation Assistant)
Email: hs563

Nigel Thomas (Digital Library Systems Developer)