Posted March 4, 2025 by L.P. Coladangelo, DS Catalog Project and Data Manager
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New Data
New and additional data for manuscripts held by the following member institutions have been recently added to the catalog:
- University of Chicago
- Newberry Library
- Rochester Institute of Technology
- Bryn Mawr College
- Wellesley College
- Princeton University
This now brings the DS Catalog to nearly 18,000 records representing 39 different institutions/collections!
Search Site Improvements
Based on user feedback from our beta phase and other reviews of the platform, we have made updates to https://search.digital-scriptorium.org/ thanks to the efforts of developer Michael Holloway. Special thanks also go out to our Technical Director Doug Emery at Penn Libraries for working with Michael on implementing the redevelopment.
Michael’s work on the redevelopment has created two new open source code libraries which both improve the data pipeline for the DS Catalog search interface and allow others who use Wikibase technology to reuse their data more effectively.
Improvements to the interface include more powerful and consistent searching, browsing, and faceting as well as display of additional contextual information for manuscript items.
DS Schema in RDF
Thanks to a pilot project initiated by the University of Dayton, DS has developed an RDF version of its metadata schema used for original metadata creation and manuscript description. Information and documentation can be found here: https://catalog.digital-scriptorium.org/wiki/DS-schema
This DS RDF schema was the result of a collaborative project between Digital Scriptorium and the University of Dayton for enhanced description of University of Dayton’s digitized manuscript objects in an Omeka S digital library system. Project personnel include L.P. Coladangelo (Digital Scriptorium; Kent State University); Jill Crane, Ben Daigle, Henry Handley (University of Dayton); and Regine Heberlein (Princeton University).
It is now available for reuse by any institutions to structure their manuscript metadata through the DS schema in Omeka or another digital library system that supports the use of RDF.