Open Access to Yale's Collections

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Open Access to Yale's Collections

Powered by Yale's Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure, Cross Collection Discovery (CCD) provides a way to search across Yale's collections of art, natural history, books, and maps, as well as photos, audio, and video documenting people, places, and events that form part of Yale's institutional identity and contribution to scholarship. CCD virtually unites the collections of the University and allows discovery of related content held by different campus units. CCD supports broader dissemination of Yale's intellectual and cultural assets to the Yale community and the world.

CCD is part of the Yale Digital Commons (YDC), a collaborative framework for developing services to support the lifecycle management and use of Yale's digital assets. The service harvests, aggregates, and indexes information about digital and nondigital collections managed by different campus units. Users can search all of these collections from a single publicly accessible website and be redirected to the unit where the content is held for more information.

The first phase of CCD has focused on developing and implementing an architecture for metadata aggregation and dissemination. Future work will address developing CCD as a platform for the Yale community to engage with each other around Yale's collections. An important part of this effort will be assessing the service and identifying how to make it more usable and useful for teaching, learning, research, and dissemination.

CCD is built on top of open source tools, platforms, and standards, including Apache Solr, VuFind, OAICat, OAI-PMH, CDWA-Lite, Darwin Core, Dublin Core, and MARCXML. Programmatic access to metadata is available to campus developers via standard APIs and to the general public via OAI-PMH. Contact odai@yale.edu for more information.