DLC Documentation: Collaborative Digitization Partners

The University of Florida Digital Collections offer many resources and benefits for collaborative digitization partners, for all stages of digital collection building including:

Tools for Digitization
Digital Library Hosting, Customization, Maintenance & Upgrades
Digital Preservation

Each of these are detailed below.

TOOLS FOR DIGITIZATION

dLOC Digitization Toolkit
The dLOC Toolkit manages workflow and facilitates electronic transmission of the files, and it includes an online training manual and extensive documentation.
Digital Collection Infrastructure
Partners can submit files to the collaborative digital collection using the dLOC Toolkit. Those files are then automatically processed and added to the online digital library with full text search capability and zoom. In addition to the inclusion of the partner materials, we can also provide our partners with the ability to search their collection (hosted on UF servers) from their institution's website.
Existing Technological Resources
- The OCR technology has a cost of $60,000 if the partner were to build out the same technology.
- The Aware zoom image technology has a cost of $25,000 USD
- The digital library technology employed by dLOC is freeware but is maintained by two programmers and one hardware engineer at a cost of $150,000 USD annually, on more than $60,000 USD of computer and network hardware.
- UFDC/dLOC programmers take requests for system development - what benefits a dLOC partner generally benefits UF.

DIGITAL LIBRARY HOSTING, CUSTOMIZATION, MAINTENANCE, & UPGRADES

Web Portal
In addition to the benefits detailed below, UFDC partners gain access to the already operating website built upon the University of Florida Digital Center technologies which includes: highly advanced OCR/text conversion; zoom image technologies; a sophisticated digital library interface (currently based on Greenstone but soon to be migrated to more robust and more capable Fedora Digital Library technology); and access to the Florida Digital Archive (FDA).
Customizable Interface
Collaborative digitization partners can search the collections from the partner's site, from the main collaborative collection, and through customized interfaces for each partner. The technology is capable of displaying content under alternate pages. See the College of The Bahamas - dLOC Contributions as an example:
dLOC interface and The College of The Bahamas interface for their collection
UFDC interface and Matheson Museum interface for their collection
Wordmarks & Attribution
Each item in a collaborative collection can include wordmarks on the left-side toolbar when viewing items to give attribution and credit. For individual contributions aside from grant partners or larger contributions, attribution statements can also be listed within the citation for each item.
Example of two wordmarks for an item and the attribution statement for the same item:

DIGITAL PRESERVATION & SUSTAINABILITY

Florida Digital Archive
Materials added to a Collaborative Digital Collection using the dLOC ToolKit are sent to the University of Florida and maintained online and in the dark archive. The dark archive does not allow access to the public, but acts as a preservation archive with copies of the digital materials at the University of Florida (Gainesville, Florida) and in the Florida Digital Archive in (Tallahassee, Florida); and at least one other remote storage archive (currently in both Chicago and San Diego) to ensure content survival against hurricanes, earthquakes, fires and other disasters. Both FDA and UF migrate content forward based on media, hardware and format obsolescence; and both new and old formats are archived.
The digital archive technology of FDA is free to dLOC as the result of the collaboration of Florida partners. But, OCLC charges more than $1.50/GB USD annually for similar technology and attendant services. FDA archives locally and redundantly.
Compatibility
All collections are harvestable, and we can harvest the metadata of other projects. We can also dual-host content and give credit to the alternate project. Ingest of OCLC or other MARC-based catalog records, spreadsheets, finding-guides, etc. are all additional technologies currently in final test at UF and will be added soon. The Digital Collections will soon also have the ability to generate MARC-based catalog records for items entered into its systems without catalog records.

RESOURCES

Presentation explaining the dLOC ToolKit

PARTNER REQUIREMENTS

Partner Requirements: Copyright
Each partner is responsible for complying with the copyright restrictions of their submissions. Laws vary by country, and our partners are in the best position to determine the requirements for their collections. If an item hosted in dLOC is challenged, we will immediately remove the item and attempt to negotiate permission to host the item.
Partner Requirements: Digitization
The partner holding the material is responsible for the digitization following the clearance of copyright, which is also the partner's responsibility.