The UC Davis Library’s Digital Collections provides online access to digitized or born-digital materials from the UC Davis Library, with a focus on materials in the library’s Archives and Special Collections. The newly released version of the digital collections site offers more browsing options, easier access to collection-level information, and a book-style reading interface for text-based content — making it easier to explore, discover and cite materials in the library’s digital collections.
“Our digital collections bring the library’s extraordinary historical and research treasures to life, making them accessible to people around the globe,” said University Librarian and Vice Provost of Digital Scholarship William Garrity.
Navigation and discovery
The redesigned site includes new homepage icons that enable users to browse by collection, creator, format (i.e., image, video, text), and subject. The homepage also spotlights selections from the library’s world-renowned Food and Wine archives; the University Archives, which preserves UC Davis’ history and groundbreaking faculty research; and other notable collections on topics such as regional and California history.
Using the collections
The site also now includes a dedicated landing page for each collection with a description of its contents and historical significance, citation information, and highlights from the collection.
Dedicated landing page for the Beaulieu Vineyard Collection
For book-style and text-based content, researchers can flip through pages like a book. Researchers can also search within text-based items if the content has undergone OCR (optical character recognition), which translates images of text into searchable digital text.
Items in collections and search results are marked with icons to indicate if they are multiple pages or multimedia (video or audio).
A growing resource
More digital collections will be added to the site over time, facilitating exploration and research using the library’s collections by anyone, anywhere in the world. Learn more at digital.ucdavis.edu/about.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
