The Library

Digital Library Program

The UC San Diego Library’s Digital Library Program (DLP) encourages, facilitates, and supports the collaborative creation, management, delivery, and long-term preservation of digital assets in support of the Library’s mission and goals. The DLP coordinates teams comprised of members with expertise in legal issues, grant writing, subject and format knowledge, digital reformatting, metadata creation and transformation, information technology development, and web portal development.

Digital Collections

Over 40,000 items - including photographs, documents, audio and video - are available to date, which reflect a wide range of materials collected, managed and preserved by the UC San Diego Library to support teaching, learning and research. Content has been drawn from the collections of the Arts Library, Mandeville Special Collections and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archives with strengths in the topical areas of Baja California, Melanesian Anthropology, Oceanography, the Spanish Civil War, and UCSD campus history.

Access to select digital collections is made freely accessible to the UC San Diego community (faculty, staff and students) and the public via the Digital Library Collections website. There are two different states to the DAMS Public Access System (PAS): a public view and a UCSD IP Restricted Access view.  Because of copyright restrictions, fair use, or licensing agreements, some digitized materials are restricted to UCSD IP access only.

For more information, read the FAQs here.  If you have any questions about access or the copyright status of a collection, please email dlp@ucsd.edu.

Digital Asset Management System

The UCSD Library Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) is a locally developed digital repository designed to store and manage digital assets of UC San Diego.

Technical Architecture

The DAMS is an expression of our XDRE (eXtensible Digital Resource Environment) framework. It uses:

  • Resource Description Framework (RDF) data model
  • Solr search platform
  • JSON data interchange format
  • Archival Resource Key (ARK) naming scheme
  • Samba software suite for file services
  • Java based development platform

The DAMS' flexible architecture can accept a variety of data formats, schemas and web services when ingesting digital assets. It stores digital content files and allows for the creation, indexing and searching of associated metadata to locate and retrieve the content files. Content can be composed of files in any format, including text, sound, video, and images.

The DAMS is also designed to facilitate the transfer and submission of the Libraries' digital assets to Chronopolis and the California Digital Library’s Merritt, and can easily be extended to serve other purposes.  Additionally, the DAMS is able to export data in many formats, including METS, HTML, OAI, RSS, CSV.  Future plans include linking data sets with other universities and organizations.

Click here to view the DAMS technical diagram.

Metadata

The DAMS currently supports the following metadata standards:

For more information on the metadata requirements and standards for data within the DAMS, see Metadata Analysis & Specification.

Services offered in partnership with the California Digital Library

UC3Merritt

Provides a single shared solution for the preservation, management, and controlled dissemination of digital collections that support research, teaching, and learning for benefit of the UC Libraries and their users. The repository provides a set of self-service interfaces that the libraries use to deposit and manage digital objects. The services and storage are based at the CDL.

eScholarship Repository

A free, open-access infrastructure that offers UC departments, centers, and research units direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship, including pre-publication materials, journals and peer-reviewed series, postprints, and seminar papers. These materials are freely available to the public online.

Online Archive of California

A core component of the CDL, the OAC is a digital information resource that facilitates and provides access to materials such as manuscripts, photographs, and works of art held in libraries, museums, archives, and other institutions across California. The OAC is available to students, teachers, and researchers of all levels, providing access to information previously available only to scholars who traveled to collection sites.

Web Archiving Service

A service that enables librarians and scholars to capture, analyze and archive web sites and documents.

Publications and Presentations

Cristela Garcia-Spitz, "Who, What, Where: Gathering and Interpreting User Data," Society of California Archivists annual meeting, April 2013.

Cristela Garcia-Spitz, David Keser, and Greg Reser, "Center for Music Experiment: Creating a Digital Collection,"MLA SCC/NCC joint meeting, April 2011.

Mary Linn Bergstrom and Cristela Garcia-Spitz, "Project Management at UC San Diego Libraries."  SLA-SD Fall Seminar, October 1, 2010. 

Cristela Garcia-Spitz, Carmen Mitchell, and Daniel Suchy. "Mobile Access to Digital Objects & the Development Process." CurateCamp. Berkeley, CA. August 2010.

Cristela Garcia-Spitz, "Applying MPLP to Digitization: A Project Manager's Perspective," Western Roundup,  April 30, 2010.

Bradley D. Westbrook, "Using PREMIS to Automate Rights Management" Digital Preservation Workshop, October 15, 2009.

Arwen Hutt, Trish Rose-Sandler and Bradley D. Westbrook, "Balancing the Needs of Producers and Managers of Digital Assets through Extensible Metadata Normalization," Against the Grain. 

Vickie O'Riordan, "This is the Modern World; Collaborating with ARTstor," Futures Past: Twenty Years of Arts Computing.