Changes in Digital Collections and Their Metadata: A Longitudinal Study of UIUC Digital Library

Abstract

Discussions surrounding digital libraries and their metadata have become less robust than before, given that creating and hosting digital collections have become the norm for most cultural heritage institutions over the last 20 years. Consequently, there are fewer discussions of how the characteristics of digital collections and their metadata have changed over time. This article showcases the evolution of digital collections and their metadata at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library in the last 20 years. It discusses the growth of its collections and their characteristics, examines historical changes in the use of metadata elements, and explores responses to the changing nature of digitized and born-digital materials. Based on a large-scale data analysis of the digital collections and their metadata housed in UIUC Digital Library, the paper also examines the challenges and opportunities of the curation and management of digital collections and digital libraries in the future.

Keywords:

• Metadata
• metadata quality
• digital collections
• digital libraries
• historical analysis
• born-digital collections
• best practices

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Drawing on lessons learned and experiences acquired from the Digital Library’s development, the UIUC Library expanded its suite of digital content management services. The first result was the institutional repository, the Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS), which successfully migrated its contents to Medusa from another open-source system it has used since it established its service. In 2022, IDEALS adopted a new discovery layer along with an enhanced content submission interface. Ongoing efforts are in place for the development of the archival management system.

2 HathiTrust. https://www.hathitrust.org/.

3 Illinois Digital Heritage Hub, https://idhh.dp.la/about.

4 The reason the system has additional harvestable options for Illinois Digital Heritage Hub (IDHH) and Primo is that DPLA requires all content to be public domain for Harvestable IDHH, and only a specific set of collections from the special collections division wish their collections to be discoverable in Primo, UIUC’s discovery layer.