OhioLINK’s award-winning Digital Resource Commons (DRC) will soon add new tools to encourage creative scholarship within the state’s historical collections, thanks to a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The funds will be used to host three “design and build” workshops, each bringing together humanities researchers, librarians and software developers to create applications that will make it easier to combine historical collections in new ways.
“Imagine scholars being able to combine, create timelines, and add information or annotations across the Kent State Shootings Oral History collections, digitized student newspaper collections, and relevant oral histories to trace the history of the reception and reporting of the shootings,” explains OhioLINK Executive Director John Magill.
“This is an exciting opportunity to get humanities scholars directly involved in designing tools to access the digital collections in the DRC in ways that they, the end users, find most compelling and useful,” says Bowling Green State University Librarian Gwen Evans, who helped devise and write the grant.
The DRC is OhioLINK’s nationally recognized digital platform for saving, discovering and sharing Ohio’s unique, historical and scholarly materials. Currently, more than 20 academic institutions and a number of non-profit organizations have more than half a million items in the free repository, including collections as varied as historic maps of Akron, Mayan archaeology, photographs of the Wright Brothers’ first flight, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center collection, and the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives. In 2011, the DRC was honored with the American Library Association Award for Cutting Edge Technology Services because of its innovative use of Amazon’s cloud computing environment. Explore it at drc.ohiolink.edu.