Digital Collections Management

Digital Special Collections Policy for Yale Special Collections

This policy outlines the minimum requirements and best practices for access to Digital Special Collections at Yale University Library, via Aviary and the Digital Collections System (DCS). Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) is also referenced occasionally where appropriate. Primarily, this policy governs the minimum requirements that must be met for any digital objects from Yale Special Collections added to Aviary, DCS or EaaSI. Secondly, while not requirements, the best practices outlined in this policy are what all Yale Special Collection units should strive to meet for digital objects they add to Aviary, DCS or EaaSI.  In terms of metadata, this policy requires that the “bulk of descriptive metadata for digital objects must be sourced from one of Yale Library’s systems of record – currently ArchivesSpace, Sierra or Voyager. The data in these systems is mapped to Aviary and DCS via Metadata Cloud.

Guidelines for the use of Labels, Captions, and the Structure Editor in DCS

This document provides guidance on the use of the fields in the Digital Collection System (DCS) that are not supplied from the System of Record and are important to the user’s ability to understand and navigate through images in the IIIF viewer. These guidelines provide staff with standards-based principles, terminology, and controlled vocabularies to ensure a consistent user experience as they move from the database of record to the DCS. Moreover, these standards and guidelines (it is hoped) will provide tools to make the process of creating the data for these fields easier. Although there are no character limits for Label and Caption fields, brevity is highly recommended. Labels, captions, and structure data are added through the Management App using the “Update Child Objects Caption and Label” batch process. Structure data is added using the Structure Editor.