Although it’s recently been declared that the day after Halloween marks the first day of Christmas, we’re taking some time in DLS to fit in a celebration of Thanksgiving. Currently featured on the Iowa Digital Library home page are cartoons depicting the holiday from the ever-topical Ding Darling collection, alongside our newest and most gratifying digital collection: The Iowa Gallery.
Over 14 months in the making, The Iowa Gallery provides integrated access to more than 16,000 digital objects from the University of Iowa Museum of Art, the School of Art and Art History Graduate Archive, and the Daily Palette public art project. Migrating these large-scale legacy collections to the Libraries’ systems and manipulating their disparate sets of metadata to conform to library standards took an enormous amount of time and effort. A variety of staff both in and outside of the Libraries provided invaluable assistance, including Les Finken at Information Technology Services for referrals and consultation; Laura Riskedahl, former assistant in both UIMA and DLS, for expertise in art and library science; John Osborne for advanced data massage; Scott Fiddelke and Linda Roth for designing the site’s attractive interfaces (and for tolerating our many edit requests); and our content providers at UIMA and the School of Art and Art History, especially Jeff Martin, Eric Dean, Jon Winet, Craig Dietrich and Christina McClelland, for entrusting us with their collections and for their patience as we climbed some steep learning curves. We’re extremely grateful for all the hard work everybody put into this project.
Finally, we’re also thankful for the Libraries’ strong support of digital initiatives that has enabled such efforts and allowed our staff to grow to five dedicated full-time positions, up from two at the beginning of the year. With the recent addition of systems librarian Wendy Robertson and library assistant Bobby Duncan, we look forward to tackling even more ambitious projects in the coming year.
For more information on The Iowa Gallery, please see our University of Iowa News Release and the Des Moines Register article “Art online: Iowa institutions go high-tech to display, discuss works in new ways”
–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian, Digital Library Services