Catherine Quinlan – Dean of the USC Libraries
Hugh McHarg – Executive Director of Communications and Public Programming, USC Libraries
The new University of Southern California Digital Library is the outcome of significant transformations in the USC Libraries’ digitization philosophy, practice, and infrastructure. The new entity unites digitization processes, collection-development strategies, metadata services, distributed content creation, and a platform for new modes of intellectual investigation and outreach. It builds upon the libraries’ previous digital archive to engage the archival and research communities through more active channels, including content-contribution tools, digital-exhibition programs, and thematic visualizations as investigative pathways through the archives.
The session presents the USC Libraries’ Basel Mission image collection—a recently completed addition to the Internet Mission Photography Archive—as an end-to-end, philosophy-to-outreach case study of the USC Digital Library. The archives, global in scope, preserve a photographic record of 19th- and 20th-century European missionary contacts—some that are among the first such interactions—with Asia and Africa. The session will cover: the digital library’s contributor module that enables global partners to create content and descriptions; a pilot program with CHNM’s open-source Omeka exhibition platform; and a REST API pilot project that encourages mash-ups, social-media experimentation, and other means of building communities and enhancing discoverability.
Presentation [ PPT ]