The Special Collections department at the Library houses materials related to genealogy and the history of the Paducah area.  Included in the collection are historic documents, including original photographs, maps, manuscripts, postcards, etc.  Every year, more of these documents are digitized to preserve and protect their content from mother nature.

With the launch of the redesigned mclib.net site, we decided to make some of these digitized documents more accessible to the public.  We built the digitalcollections.mclib.net site to house these documents, free to the public for research or browsing.

The collection is built on the Omeka platform, which is an open-source service specifically geared toward managing digital collections in museum and library settings.  It also happens to be very easy to use, which is a major plus for patrons who want to find specific digital items.

Two of our collections are up already, the Hugh Edwards Collection, and the Postcard Collection.  The metadata is a little scarce at the moment, but we’ll be adding more in the coming months, including data collected through the Tagging the Hugh Edwards Collection experiment in the Labs.