Developing Repositories for Collecting 21st Century Ephemera

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Fedora Interest Group Presentations

Traditionally, ephemera has been defined as paper objects that are remnants of people and events from the past. They were not meant to be permanent documents. Through scarcity and interpretation ephemeral materials have become primary sources for researchers. While ephemera of the past can be digitized from our current print repositories, what will we do about collecting ephemera of the present and future? What does it mean when ephemera is multilingual, lives on the network, can be duplicated, and may have current political interest and concern? In the last 18 months, UCLA has implemented a new repository using Islandora. While our old system needed an upgrade, new projects were the true catalyst for change. This presentation will discuss how one particular project, the International Digitizing Ephemera Project, enabled a transformation of our repository and better outreach to the wider world. This presentation will describe technical aspects of our Islandora repository, the development of the International Digitizing Ephemera Project at UCLA and the most effective ways repositories at university libraries can locate themselves in the ecosystem of 21c political ephemera.