University of Oregon Libraries

About UO Digital Library Collections

Tour some of the UO Libraries' digital collections here.

According to its mission statement, the "University of Oregon Libraries enriches the student learning experience, encourages exploration and research at all levels, and contributes to advancements in access to scholarly resources." Digital collections, like all collections within the University of Oregon Libraries, are designed to support the instructional and research needs of the University of Oregon and the citizens of the state of Oregon. The key to building successful, durable digital collections is to develop and strengthen partnerships within the Libraries, across campus, with specific user communities, and with our counterparts at other institutions. Materials in the Libraries' digital collections are carefully selected by collection curators and subject specialists, digitized according to prevailing standards, described in such a way as to facilitate their discovery and use, and preserved so that they will be accessible over the long term.

Current efforts

A number of collections are currently available to the public. To search the live collections visit the Digital Collections home page.

Metadata Services and Digital Projects coordinates and maintains the Libraries' digital collections that are being implemented using the CONTENTdm and DSpace software packages.
Art Images
Members of the A&AA Library, Collection Development & Acquisitions, Library Systems, and Metadata Services and Digital Projects are working to develop several digital collections of art and architecture materials. These collections will consist of images licensed or created in support of the instructional programs of the School of Architecture and Applied Arts. Access to specific images may be restricted to members of the University of Oregon community. Currently (April 2006) the collections contain many images licensed through Art on File. There is a browsable list of the sub-collections available in this collection. Additionally, there may occasionally be materials made available in support of particular courses, such as ARH358. These collections are UO restricted by IP address.
Athletics and the Academy
The Libraries are the repository for many documents and images of important figures in the history of UO athletics. Through a generous gift from Dave and Terry Taylor, the Libraries have begun to create a digital collection of these materials. The purpose of this project is to use the historical archives of the University: documents, photographs, physical objects, and audiovisual materials - to tell the story of athletics at the University of Oregon. More than just statistics of accomplishments, this is the story of people and events that changed athletics at the University of Oregon over the past 110 years. It is also the story of athletics in higher education: the relationship and the issues involved between athletics and the academy over time. These materials are also available in the online Leadership & Legacy exhibit.
Building Oregon

Building Oregon: Architecture of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest provides over 14,000 images and documentation about the architectural heritage of the Pacific Northwest with special emphasis on Oregon's built environment. In collaboration with the Oregon State Historic Preservation Office, many images in the collection represent works listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A significant number of images come from collections donated to the University of Oregon Libraries over the years, including the collection of architectural historian Marion Dean Ross.
Dissociation and Trauma Archives
The UO Department of Psychology and the UO Libraries have teamed up to create an important new digital collection of ground-breaking medical and scientific literature in the field of dissociation and trauma. Dissociation and Trauma Archives contains the full text of many articles appearing in key journals published between 1862 and 1922.
Historic Sheet Music Collection
The University of Oregon Libraries present here a selection of images from the collections of printed sheet music held by the Music Services Department and in the Oregon Collection of Special Collections & University Archives at the University of Oregon Libraries. Initial focuses include: Oregon Music and Women Composers.
Historical Photograph Collection
Established through a generous gift from Margaret and Thomas Hart, the University of Oregon Libraries present the Historical Photograph Collection. This collection is designed to showcase images and make the public aware of the quality and depth of the photograph collections owned by the University of Oregon Libraries. The larger goal is to encourage further research on the original photographic materials. The collections included represent a small sampling of the more than 400,000 images that make up the photographic collections in Special Collections & University Archives.
Japanese American Student Relocation Council Records

University of Oregon. Office of the Dean of Personnel Administration. National Japanese American Student Relocation Council Records 1942-1946

The National Japanese American Student Relocation Council was created by university administrators as a means of relocating Japanese American college students to other universities and colleges away from the West coast during World War II, and to prevent these students from being interned in government-run internment camps. At the University of Oregon, Karl Onthank, Dean of Personnel Administration, represented the University in relocating UO Japanese American students. The collection includes correspondence, newsletters, speeches, minutes of meetings, and ephemera. Guide to this collection.
Percent for Art
Passed in 1975, the Percent for Art legislation mandates that 1% of the direct construction funds of new or remodeled state buildings with construction budgets of $100,000 or more be set aside for the acquisition of art work. The Oregon Arts Commission manages the program and maintains the archives of slides and documentation for the works of art selected. The University of Oregon Libraries and the Commission have received an LSTA grant to create a digital collection of the program's archives. Work on the project has just begun (April 2006) and the first images will be available in June 2006. The project will span two years and will make approximately 10,000 digital objects available for use.
Picturing the Cayuse, Walla Walla and Umatilla Tribes
Scanning glass-plate negatives from the Moorhouse photograph collection, the Libraries have worked with members of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla to create a multi-cultural digital collection. Consisting of images of tribal people, their lands, and their environment in the early part of the twentieth century, the collection is unique in that it contains descriptions and explanations of the images provided by the tribal people whose ancestors are depicted in the photographs, as well as descriptions and other metadata provided by the University Libraries.
Ulmann Photograph Collection
The Doris Ulmann Photography Collection casts a wide net across a number of related fields throughout the humanities: social and cultural history, women 's studies, African-American studies, ethnography, and the history of photography. Ulmann's photographs represent important primary source material for historical and ethnographic studies of Appalachian and Gullah culture as well the subject of folk arts and craft traditions. Materials in the Library's Ulmann Collection include 2,739 silver gelatin glass plate negatives, 304 original matted prints, and 79 albums (containing over 10,000 proof prints) assembled by the Doris Ulmann Foundation. The current site is a draft site that provides access to the images while a more fully described collection is being prepared.
University of Oregon Office of the President
Since the founding of the University of Oregon in 1876, the twenty-one presidents of the University have exercised a huge influence on the direction of education in the state and nation. The papers of these twenty-one presidents contain a unique and valuable record of the development of the University of Oregon and the history of higher education in the United States. The purpose of this project is to highlight this rich history through selected documents from the Office of the President records and the personal papers of presidents. Students participating in the Honors College colloquium on university history and other presidential history researchers selected some of the documents displayed on the site. Currently those presidencies represented are those currently studied by students at the university. The long-term goal of this collection is to represent all of the presidencies and provide a gateway to further research.
University of Oregon's Scholars' Bank

Utilizing DSpace software freely available from MIT Libraries and Hewlett Packard, the University of Oregon has implemented an institutional repository, called Scholars' Bank. It is an archive to preserve and make more widely available to the international scholarly community the intellectual output of the University of Oregon community. The archive contains the work of faculty, students and other members of the University community and includes articles, presentations, theses, working papers, newsletters, journals, reports, and historical works that have been digitized. Materials in Scholars' Bank are accessible through the World Wide Web, as well as within the archive itself.
UO Stock Photos (currently UO restricted)
Purpose:
- To create an online resource of stock photographic images of the people, places, and happenings of the University of Oregon.
- To provide a centralized digital collection of stock photographic images generated by the UO Libraries and other campus units and departments.
- To contribute new digital and analog content to the University Archives photograph collection.
- To provide a centralized digital delivery system for library and campus clients.
- To oversee rights management of online stock image library.
Western Waters Digital Library: The Columbia River Basin in Oregon
The Greater Western Library Alliance, of which the UO Libraries are a part, was awarded an IMLS grant to develop a digital collection called the Western Waters Digital Library. The University of Oregon Libraries is contributing images, maps, and documents from its Columbia River collections and providing metadata for them according to project standards. The result is a union catalog of digital materials on the waters of the Western states that will be of use to scholars, researchers, and public policy makers. The union catalog is available at: http://www.westernwaters.org/.

Digital collections using other software

e-Asia Digital Library
A project of the Collection Development & Acquisitions Department, e-Asia is funded by the University of Oregon Libraries through the generosity of Nissho Iwai. Dr. Robert Felsing, East Asian Bibliographer, is the originator and coordinator of the e-Asia project. The e-Asia database of web-accessible full text currently holds approximately 3,000 items. The largest database by far is that of Chinese materials with Japan a distant second. Databases for Taiwan and the Koreas are small and in the formative stage. For further information, contact e-Asia. Staff from Metadata Services and Digital Projects are providing limited assistance on the project.
Northwest Digital Archive
The Northwest Digital Archives (NWDA) is a multi-year project to provide enhanced access to archival and manuscript materials in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington through a union database of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids. Finding aids to thousands of regionally significant collections have been encoded by the University of Oregon, Oregon State University, the University of Washington and many other regional libraries and archives and loaded to the shared database. The next phase of the project targets digitization of selected materials. Special Collections & University Archives and Metadata Services and Digital Projects are working together on this project.
School of Journalism and Communications Advertising Archive
University of Oregon faculty members wanting to show television advertisements as part of their lectures will no longer have to spend hours searching and collecting the material. By the fall of 2004, Journalism and Communications and the UO Libraries hope to have at least 500 to 1,000 television advertisements collected on a searchable database available to faculty and students. As of August 2004, there were 800 video clips in the database. The television advertisements have been indexed using Virage, the library's new video-on-demand system. Media Services is playing the lead role in this effort. Metadata Services and Digital Projects has provided assistance with defining the metadata.
UO Channel
UO Channel is a gateway to video programs that reflect the quality, creativity, and diversity of academic and cultural life at the University of Oregon. Featured programs include lectures, interviews, performances, symposia, documentary productions, and more. The programs available through the UO Channel are also being archived in the University of Oregon's Scholars' Bank. The UO Channel is a collaborative service of the UO Libraries, Public and Media Relations, and the Computing Center.

The Future

A number of possible future collections include:

Digital Aerial Photograph Collection
The Document Center of the UO Libraries has submitted a grant proposal for funding to create a public Internet site permitting free access to digitized images of large portions of the University of Oregon Libraries' outstanding collection of aerial photography. The Libraries' collection of half a million images is one of the nation's premier collections, covering the entire State of Oregon, and comprising over 700 air photo projects from the late 1920s to the present. Portions of the collection, especially the older series, are in danger of being lost due to age and heavy use. This project would enable users to select, view and download images appropriate to their needs. The Document Center would play the lead role in this project, with Metadata Services and Digital Projects staff providing assistance to help establish the metadata standards for the project. Although the initial grant proposal was not accepted, the project could be undertaken if an alternative funding source were identified.
Don Hunter Archive
IMLS awarded a grant to enable the University of Oregon Libraries to collaborate with the University's Museum of Natural and Cultural History to bring the unique work of a local photographer and audio archivist to a wider audience. Mr. Hunter, who began documenting the sights and sounds of Oregon's people and places in the 1930s, created multimedia presentations that combine historic images with unique recorded and collected sounds, including sounds from nature such as rare bird calls. The project provided a model for the digitization of diverse audio and visual records in a variety of formats.
Eugene Print Collection
The Eugene Print Collection, created and maintained by University Archives & Special Collections, contains 118 historic photographs of Eugene in the 19th and 20th centuries. These images are in a variety of formats including prints, postcards, sketches, and negatives. These images have been assembled from the much larger "Print Collection" of photographs from locations across the Northwest and around the world. Work has begun to migrate the images and the descriptions into the CONTENTdm software.
Medieval Manuscripts
Under the coordination of Metadata Services and Digital Projects, the Medieval Manuscripts Collection is a highly collaborative project involving UO faculty from the Wired Humanities Project, the Feminist Humanities Project, the Department of Romance Languages and the Medieval Studies Program, as well as staff from the Libraries' Special Collections & University Archives and Reference and Research Services departments. While most of the manuscripts to be digitized are likely to be drawn from the Burgess Manuscript Collection, the first manuscript to be digitized is from the Rare Books Collection. The project team has begun to digitize the Cheltenham manuscript, otherwise known as La Geste de Monglane, using it to develop the methodology for digitizing subsequent manuscripts. While the Libraries will make the collection available using CONTENTdm software, the Wired Humanities Project will develop interactive scholars' web sites using duplicate copies of the digitized texts. Some test scans have been done and loaded into a trial database. Book IV of the Cheltenham manuscript has been digitized, with other books to follow.
Warner Collection
The University of Oregon Libraries is seeking funding to digitize a selection of approximately 1,000 lantern slides from the Gertrude Bass Warner collection. Mrs. Warner (1863-1951) was an inveterate traveler and collector in Asia. The art collection that she and her husband assembled served as the foundation for the university's Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and the library houses her art library, personal papers, ephemera, and lantern slides. As Mrs. Warner traveled in the years 1904 to 1929, prior to and during military conflict in China, Japan, Korea, and Cambodia, she was able to collect images of places and traditions that have now vanished. The Warner lantern slide collection consists of 5,500 images, many hand-colored, dating from 1910 to 1929. In addition to images taken by Mrs. Warner, the collection includes slides purchased on her travels. The images depict art objects, crafts, structures, religious and traditional ceremonies, landscapes, and people. A selection of Warner slides has been digitized and is available in the Historical Photographs collection at: http://libweb.uoregon.edu/catdept/digcol/gh/index.html and searchable by "Warner" in the search box.

Consulting and Production Support

Metadata Services and Digital Projects, Media Services, and other library staff will consult, as requested, with faculty and campus groups about digital projects that they are undertaking. Some of those efforts are listed below.

Museum of Natural and Cultural History
Staff of the University's Museum of Natural History have asked for assistance in creating and providing access to a digital collection of images of their basket collection. MSDP staff have met with Museum staff and designed a prototype collection using CONTENTdm software. Individual baskets will be represented by multiple images showing different views of the basket. After training, Museum staff will have full control of the content and contextual information of the collection, which will be mounted and preserved on the library's servers.
Streaming Media & Podcasts
UO Streaming Media is a collaborative service of the University Libraries and the Computing Center. UO Streaming Media Provides faculty and students with a well-supported environment for creating, indexing, archiving, and distributing video and audio content over the web. This service is made possible by the generous support of the Educational Technology Committee.

In December 2003, responsibility for coordinating digital library projects was officially transferred to the newly-reorganized department of Metadata Services and Digital Projects (MSDP). Other key partners within the Libraries include: Special Collections & University Archives, Library Systems, Media Services, the Center for Educational Technologies, the Document Center, the Metadata Implementation Group, Library Systems, Collection Development & Acquisitions, and all collection curators and subject specialists.

For information or questions about the UO Libraries' digital collections, contact the Department Head or the Digital Collections Coordinator of Metadata Services and Digital Projects, University of Oregon Libraries.

Maintained by: Karen Estlund, kestlund@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 07/07/2008