We are excited to announce the next step in the evolution of our digital collections. LMU Digital Collections is now hosted on Quartex, the digital collections platform created by Adam Matthew.
We launched our digital library program in January 2009, a full eight months before the actual William H. Hannon Library building, a new construction, opened its doors to its campus. At the time, the program consisted of three collections housing 649 digital objects. In the past decade, our digital collections have grown to more than 10,000 items and 18 unique collections. These collections include historically significant documents, photographs, correspondence, manuscripts, scrapbooks, slides, maps, and diaries. They cover a variety of subject areas including the history of Southern California, Catholicism in Los Angeles, and Loyola Marymount University; postcards from around the world; medieval manuscripts, and more.
From the Adam Matthew Digital Press Release:
AM Digital and LMU have a long-standing relationship, with many of the award-winning publisher’s digital resources available to all staff and students at the University. Today marks the next stage in that partnership, with LMU adopting Quartex for their special collections and migrating their entire suite from OCLC’s CONTENTdm platform. Today, the first site, LMU Digital Collections, has gone live on Quartex.
“Our mission at the William H. Hannon Library is to provide a portal to rich collections in a variety of formats and representing diverse topics and perspectives, in support of LMU’s educational and research mission,” says Kristine Brancolini, dean of the Library. “Migrating our content to Quartex allows us to further centralize the library as the intellectual heart of the campus through accessible online collections and user-friendly platforms.”
Khal Rudin, Managing Director at AM Digital commented: “Our vision for Quartex was to utilise the skills and technical investment we’ve made to help libraries around the world showcase and celebrate their own special collections. We are thrilled that the team at LMU’s William H. Hannon Library decided to embrace that vision, which is strongly aligned to their own mission of making great collections accessible and available to all.”
The first suite of collections to go live on the platform includes the Venegas Family Papers, Werner Von Boltenstern Shanghai Photograph and Negative Collection, and fifteen other unique collections.
“Migrating to Quartex will streamline management of our digital collections in a comprehensive cloud-based solution. The new platform showcases LMU’s distinctive digital content and provides improved functionality for our students and faculty. Furthermore, Quartex enhances our ability to provide access to unique audiovisual materials.” – Daniel Draper, Head of Systems and Digital Initiatives at Loyola Marymount University.
To learn more about our new platform, including how to search the collections or utilize it for research, contact a librarian.
About Quartex and Adam Matthew Digital
Adam Matthew Digital is an award-winning publisher of primary source content with 30 years’ experience identifying and making accessible primary resource collections from leading archives and libraries around the world. The publisher is an independent company within the SAGE Group, based in the United Kingdom, and has offices around the world. As its guiding philosophy, AM Digital believes that at the heart of education is the freedom to think critically. Each year it publishes new, relevant primary source collections that span a wide variety of topics ranging from gender and sexuality, literature, art, politics, war, business, popular culture and more. These curated collections are offered to academic institutions on a customized platform designed to maximize discoverability and drive usage to primary source content to enhance learning.
AM Digital’s experience of curating and showcasing archival collections has informed development of the technology underlying all the collections released, which ensures that customers can effectively discover, access and explore the content published. This technology is made available, as Quartex, to libraries, archives and other heritage institutions, to facilitate digital open access publishing. Quartex is a hosted solution developed by a dedicated and skilled team of engineers. It is designed to support a broad range of repositories’ needs, including academic libraries, public libraries, historical societies and museums. It benefits from a continual program of investment and development, as new functionality is added to support the requirements of both customers and the AM Digital publishing schedule.
About the William H. Hannon Library
The William H. Hannon Library fosters excellence in academic achievement through an array of distinctive services that enable learners to feed their curiosity, experience new worlds, develop their ideas, inform their decision-making, and inspire others. The library is open to the public during regular business hours. More information can be found at http://library.lmu.edu.