The Digitization Centre is celebrating its 10th anniversary and the end of an unprecedented year by publishing this report. It highlights our key activities of the Digitization Centre over the past year and since March 2011 including: COVID-19 impact, partnership network, collections, software enhancements and upgrades, and user engagement statistics.
Our Response to COVID-19:
In light of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, the Digitization Centre was closed from March through November 2020, at which time operations were resumed at a reduced level until the Sept 2021 reopening. Although most of our active digitization work was paused, this pause provided a chance to focus on other projects and tasks.
Partnership and Collections:
We have collaborations with more than 10 UBC departments/ Library units, and partnerships with more than 20 other libraries and institutions to create the digital resources available through our Open Collections. You will be amazed to discover that our most popular collection has received more than 13,832,000 item views and our oldest digitized material dates from 2029-1982 BCE.
BC Historical Newspapers
The Daily News, 1918-11-11
Ancient Artefacts
[Letter from an unknown writer to his or her mother], [between 100 and 199 BCE?]
BC Historical Books
A bibliography of British Columbia. Years of Growth, 1900-1950, 1975
The Chung Collection
Pins, [between 1920 and 1986?]
Epigraphic Squeezes
Springhouse, [between 199 and 100 BCE]
Other Honourable Mentions:
Web Archiving: Major additions to UBC’s web archiving portal on Archive-it include COVID-19 Pandemic in British Columbia (the first COVID-19 collection), and collections related to the COVID-19 pandemic such as UBC’s response, K-12 education in British Columbia, impacts on the Downtown Eastside, and incidents of racism against the Asian communities in Canada.
Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) Project: After months of challenging work, we have made substantial progress and are heading to the final few stages of data migration from CONTENTdm to DSpace 7. We look forward to launching the new DAMS very soon!
Archivematica: We continue to implement the Library’s digital preservation mandate by preserving 46.7 TB of content using Archivematica, for example, BC Historical Newspapers and BC Historical Books. The operating systems on our servers and all Archivematica pipelines and storage service have been upgraded from 1.9 to 1.11.
Thanks for checking this out and if you want more details, remember to read the report!
