Digital Collections News

What will the library of the future be like?

Along with the rest of the Northwestern library departments, Digital Collections will be participating in a very important space planning project during the next few months. Digital Collections staff are currently working out of four different locations in two buildings. If we are eventually united in a single space, how can we continue to provide good service to faculty and to library departments, while taking advantage of our combined strengths to do the things we haven't yet been able to?

Digital Collections is just past its six month birthday (formally, we came into existence on October 1, 2007) and is getting ready for another round of internal planning this summer. What works well? What doesn't work as well? Where do our services intersect with those of other departments, and what additional opportunities for collaboration does this create? These are the questions we'll be discussing, and they dovetail very nicely with the space planning discussions.

Last week, the UK Joint Information Systems Commission, or JISC, held its annual meeting with the topic "Libraries of the Future." The Guardian dedicated its Education supplement, "Libraries Unleashed," to some of the solutions and projects highlighted in the conference. As we talk about how to manage the Digital Collections project queue, and how to adequately serve faculty and graduate students doing production projects in our lab, we want to also remember to think about things we've barely dreamt of yet. How will teachers and students of the future use the thousands and thousands of images in the Digital Image Library? How will researchers interact with our digital library collections? How will they conduct their scholarly work, and what tools will they need? How can we support and sustain and keep it all safe? What about undergraduate scholars? What kinds of library spaces should there be for learning and teaching and collaborating, and what should we be thinking about as we prepare the digital content that will be a crucial part of that experience? We'll periodically post updates here as we progress with our planning. (Comments and thoughts welcome!)

ImageViewer for the Digital Image Library

If you've recently tried to use the ImageViewer associated with the Digital Image Library after not doing so for a few months, you may have had a bit of trouble. This is because of a server migration that took place in December (http://images.northwestern.edu is the new URL!).

With our new address, the stand alone ImageViewer will no longer work and therefore needs to be reinstalled on each computer that uses it. If you haven't done so already, please delete your old ImageViewer, along with any shortcuts from your computer, and re-install ImageViewer on your computer. The ImageViewer can be downloaded under "Resources-->Downloads". If you have any problems, or should need assistance reinstalling the ImageViewer, please contact Julie (847-491-8023) or Roman (847-491-8022) in the VMC.

Note: This change does not involve your "Packaged Slideshows"--only the ImageViewer application that is installed on your computer.