Interactive and Interdisciplinary: Knowledge Management Since 1997, the Digital
Collections
Program, McGill University Libraries has produced twenty large and small scale scholarly digital
collections of varying degrees of complexity. For the most part, the projects are based upon on the Library's unique rare collections ranging from architectural archives, literary and historical manuscripts, to photographic and print collections. Central to the success of the McGill projects has been the matching of a project curator whose knowledge of a collection is mapped to the editorial and technical role the Digital Collections Program plays during the course of producing a digital project.
The
production of these digital collections from the moment of content selection to the final click of the mouse on the day of the project launch is a complex process drawing upon several concurrent and complimentary models: traditional scholarly monograph editorial practices, knowledge management, multimedia production, software and database design and web page design.
The emerging practice of the McGill University, Digital Collections Program is to insure that its digital collections are set within a scholarly framework to insure that the project meets rigorous intellectual standards and to provide technical solutions that will enable the end-user to interact with the collection in a meaningful way and from a number of perspectives. These range from the contextual apparatus created to aid interaction with the collection to the mechanisms designed to access and the retrieve the primary documents. In addition, this combination is designed to meet the information needs of a range of users from students to advanced researchers ranging across a number of disciplines.