Digital Research Library - Documentation
The following guidelines document the workflow and procedures of the Digital Research Library (DRL).
Although the guidelines were written for DRL use and may not be applicable to other digital library programs, they may be of interest to students and faculty of library and archival management programs and academic digital library departments.
We are members of the University of Michigan's Digital Library eXtension Service, which develops much of the software used to serve our collections online. Although we are not able to share the XPAT search engine, Michigan has made the CGI scripts available as open source.
General DRL Documentation:
- DRL Technical Capabilities: PDF
- Checklist for Digitization Projects: PDF
- In-house (University Library System) Scanning Guidelines: PDF
Image Collections:
- Guidelines for Working with the DRL to Create Image Collections
- Creating Image Retrieval Links within DRL Image Collections: PDF
- Documentation for the Historic Pittsburgh Image Collections is on a separate page.
- Blank Excel spreadsheet containing required Historic Pittsburgh Image Collection Metadata Fields.
NEH Project Pilot Digitization Project of Chinese Texts:
- Metadata guidelines (last revised 6-22-2004): PDF
Historic Pittsburgh Project:
Please note: much of the documentation in this section was written for previous production efforts and therefore may not represent the most current practices within the DRL.
Documentation for the Historic Pittsburgh Image Collections is on a separate page.
Historic Pittsburgh Full-Text:
- Selection Search and Review Form: PDF
- Book Digitization Tracking Sheet: PDF
- Assigning Temporary Book Location: PDF
- Guidelines for spreadsheet preparation: PDF
- Electronic editions header preparation: PDF
- Preparation of shipments to the scanning vendor: PDF
- Using the post-imaging quality control tool: PDF
- Documentation for the PrView tools: PDF
- Running the OCR Process: PDF
- Creating SGML, Indexing, and Mounting Online: PDF