Cross Collection Discovery in the Yale Digital Commons

Abstract

Teaching and research at Yale are supported by the University's extensive collections, from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to the Peabody Museum of Natural History. These collections are being made discoverable online and accessible in digital form, but they typically exist as silos. Users must navigate a vast array of web sites to discover them. The goal of Cross Collection Discovery is to provide members of the Yale community and the public with a way to discover and explore collections managed by different units at Yale from a single point of entry.

Metadata records that conform to standard XML schemas are aggregated via OAI-PMH or file transfer. Records are crosswalked and indexed in Solr and made discoverable in an implementation of VuFind. Programmatic access to records will be provided via a VuFind API and a central OAI data provider. The interface is currently under development and will be launched in Spring 2011.

Cross Collection Discovery is one component of the Yale Digital Commons (YDC), a collaborative framework for developing services to support the lifecycle management and use of Yale's digital assets. The YDC provides institutional infrastructure to serve a wide range of digital production, collaboration, dissemination, and stewardship needs. The Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure is leading the YDC, in partnership with the libraries, galleries, museums, and media production and communications units at Yale.