New Stuffs on the Horizon...

Now that Historical Perspectives of Canadian Publishing is all finished up we have time, albeit a small amount of time, to concentrate on other portions of the Digital Collections site, and other collections.

World War, 1939-1945, German Concentration Camps and Prisons Collection is nearly complete. Only a few boxes remain to be scanned. The next portion of the project is World War, 1939-1945, Jewish Underground Resistance Collection. This collection is predominantly from 1941-1944 and will contain 325 items. The finding aid for this collection is located here. These collections are two parts of a larger overall project, The Virtual Museum of the Holocaust and Resistance, which is to come much later. That site will be a separate site which pulls from the digital collections site.

Another project that will take a bit more time, but will be an excellent resource once complete is the migration of the World War I Maps & Aerial Photography over to the digital collections site. This will also include approximately 900 more trench maps. The collection will retain the use of mrsid formatting, and the use of the Lizard Tech mrsid delivery server. But, we will also be including JPEG2000 versions of each map & aerial photo and those will be served up with a new Djaktoa image server that our team is working on implementing. Open source > Proprietary :D

The major background project that we will be working on implementing is an upgrade from Drupal 5.x to Drupal 6.x, and cleaning up our code base. Moving to Drupal will provide us with some major improvements. Namely, RDFa support which I am the most excited about! We will also be working on a solution that will allow our catalogue to pull from our collections. Thereby, allowing users to search all of our collections at once from the library catalogue.

Keep an eye on the site. I will announce stuff once we have implemented. Maybe there will be a site redesign in there too!

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Nick Ruest
Associate Librarian

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