You may recently have noticed that York Digital Library (or YODL as it was known) is no longer with us. Since it first launched in 2010, YODL has provided digital access to a range of our unique and distinctive collections, from 13th century church manuscripts to 20th century scientific instruments. But as is true of us all, YODL got old–and with age comes (what I hope will be a very happy) retirement.
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| The York Digital Library home page--to which we say a fond farewell |
And so we enter a new phase of York’s digital collections, one which we hope will offer the opportunity to rethink how we deliver digital access in order to better support a range of research and uses. Regular readers of the Borthwick blog will know that we are home to archives, rare books, and artworks that span centuries. These materials tell stories that you won’t find elsewhere. The ongoing development of our new digital library, Discover.York, will let our users interact with these important collections and discover the stories they tell, whether they are down the road or across the globe.
But in addition to increasing the reach of our collections, digital access provides opportunities for users to explore and understand our collections in new ways. As the team here at York continue to plan for the development of Discover.York, we have been inspired by examples at other organisations where digital content can be annotated and transcribed, curated into insightful digital exhibitions, and shared and compared with collections held elsewhere. We have been excited to see research based on large corpuses of digital content, using machine learning, topic modelling, and named entity recognition. Such methods can reveal patterns and threads that might otherwise have been impossible to spot. And we have been curious about how the discovery of digital collections can help our user communities tell their own stories. In all of these examples, we see opportunities for our collections and our users.
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| The homepage of our new digital library, Discover.York |
So, what’s next for York’s digital collections? Well, work on Discover.York is already underway, with a handful of collections now available. We’ve plans to add a further three collections over the coming weeks, including the Lord Halifax diaries (1940-6), and photographs from the Vickers Instruments Archive and the University of York Archive, with more to follow as development progresses. You’ll also find digitised content in our YorSearch Rare Books Collection. Looking further into the future, we’ll be working hard to enhance Discover.York with a range of features that will let our users discover, explore, and interact with our unique collections. This will be a gradual process and one that will take time. Our goals are ambitious and there will doubtless be many lessons learned along the way. We’ll continue to share updates with you for the duration of this work. In the meantime, if you have questions about digital collections that were previously accessible via YODL, please contact our team at dti-service-desk-group@york.ac.uk.
We hope you’ll join us in thanking YODL for its fine service and we look forward to sharing more about the ongoing development of Discover.York over the coming months and years.
