Digital Libraries Colloquium

On Wednesday, April 4th, Ed Galloway will discuss “Collaborating with Pitt Faculty to Build Image Collections" as part of the Digital Libraries Colloquium Series.  The lecture by Galloway, the Coordinator of the Digital Research Library at the University of Pittsburgh, will be held at 12:00 noon in Room 501 of the Information Science Building.  The lecture is free and open to the public. 

The Digital Research Library (DRL) supports the teaching and research mission of the University of Pittsburgh by serving users through the creation and delivery of Web-accessible digital collections. The DRL has experienced tremendous growth since it was established as a new department within the University Library System in 1999. From its inception, the DRL focused on creating text-based collections whose digitization and accessibility on the Web would aid the research of scholars, historians, faculty, and students. The DRL has since expanded its tools and capabilities to provide access to an array of material, including photographs, slides, negatives, maps, manuscripts, illustrations, postcards, drawings, broadsheets, posters, audio, video, finding aids, and bibliographic catalogs of collections.

This presentation will introduce the different types of collections digitized and mounted by the DRL. In particular, Ed will discuss the importance of forming partnerships with other ULS departments, local institutions, and Pitt faculty to rapidly build local image and text collections. Ed will describe changes in the department's workflow and scanning requirements in order to tackle larger projects in an efficient manner. He will also talk about the unique relationships formed by the DRL with faculty at Pitt who seek to mount their images online for research, teaching and instruction purposes.

The DRL is currently engaged in a major endeavor to digitize large portions of the Darlington Memorial Library, which comprises books, maps, atlases, manuscripts, broadsides, and photographs. Ed will discuss the plans and methods of achieving this goal within the next several years. As a founding member of the Open Content Alliance, the ULS will contribute the image files from this project to the Internet Archive for broader access.

Ed Galloway is the Coordinator of the Digital Research Library (DRL) at the University of Pittsburgh. He has a B.A. in History from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas and an MLIS from the University of Texas. In 1993 he moved to Pittsburgh to work for Carnegie Mellon University as the archivist responsible for processing the congressional papers of the late Senator John Heinz. He also managed the digitization of nearly one million pages from the collection that are available online.

The Digital Libraries Colloquium is sponsored by the School of Computer Science-Carnegie Mellon University, the School of Information Sciences-University of Pittsburgh, the University Library System-University of Pittsburgh, the University Libraries-Carnegie Mellon University and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.