Digital Content and Collections
Who we are
- Leadership: Kat Hagedorn
- Organization chart
- Staff directory for Digital Content and Collections
What we do
We’re primarily responsible for digitizing materials, ingesting digital content into internal and external repositories, and creating, hosting, and maintaining collected and curated materials in digital collections.
In our Digital Conversion Unit (DCU), we provide digital conversion and preservation of books, maps, posters, and other flat media, as well as limited audio and moving image digitization. This work includes photographing three-dimensional artifacts when needed. Our primary mission is to digitize materials from the general stacks and more specialized collections.
We create, host, and maintain the U-M Library digital collections, which consist of images, texts, and more from libraries and museums across campus and our region. They are distinctive in providing a stable platform where people can access digitized materials from curated collections across campus.
Through our partnership with HathiTrust Digital Library, we prepare U-M and external bound materials for preservation and access in the HathiTrust platform. We also partner with the Google Books Library Project to scan most of our physical volumes from the U-M shelves for ingest.
We’re responsible for producing accurate, searchable, full-text transcriptions of early printed materials in our Text Creation Unit, as well as aggregating metadata from the state of Michigan’s strong, varied digital collections in our Michigan Service Hub for the purposes of contributing to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).
What we’re working on
The library’s digital collections platform fulfills our commitment to robust discovery and preservation of digitized materials. We are currently building a new platform to improve the experience of people who access, use, maintain, and share these curated collections.
Our vision is to create a diverse, dynamic, community-driven platform that facilitates the human work of producing and maintaining digital collections. We are building this platform as we practice the principles of anti-racism, equity, and accessibility.