Kentuckiana Digital Library

The Kentuckiana Digital Library (KDL), affiliated with the Kentucky Virtual Library and consisting of many subset collections, contains finding aids, newspapers, electronic texts, images, maps and oral histories from historical archives all over the state of Kentucky. It also aims to "provide guidance and instruction for Kentucky libraries, archives, historical societies and museums on applying appropriate technologies used in the production of digital library resources."

Collection Principles: The KDL is not trying to digitize every item within the Kentucky archival repositories��� collections. Rather, all items chosen to be digitized will have a ���strong Kentucky orientation as well as broad appeal on geographic, content and study levels. The materials will be unique or not widely available. Collections will be proposed by archivists at the repositories based on their evaluation of the materials' appeal and appropriateness.���
Currently there are 230,000 pages of electronic text, 50,000 images, two dozen full text newspapers, 4 complete oral history projects, and an undetermined number of maps.

Object Characteristics: The KDL is powered by the DLXS software suite, built to ���utilize XML data transformed through XSLT for online delivery via the World Wide Web.���
One could search within all 24 or so newspapers or choose one to search, or just browse individual newspapers or issues. When you click on an individual page, a .pdf automatically downloads to your computer. (The Bluegrass Blade, from 1890, states that it���s ���The Only Prohibition Paper Published by a Heathen���, and the cost per year is ���$2.00 for Rich People, $1.00 for Poor People���)

Three sizes of each map were available, and were easily downloadable in .jpg format. You could zoom in and out, and pan from side to side, but this was not possible to do in the electronic text documents.

There are four major oral history projects within the KDL, and are playable in full, or in 5-minute segments, as .mp3s through Quicktime Player. You can also ���extract��� a segment of your choosing, but it was unclear to me what this actually meant. I clicked on it and nothing seemed to happen. Likewise, there was a symbol and text combo for audio + transcript, but I couldn���t figure out how to find the transcript. That is, until I clicked on ���download complete file���, which I would have thought would mean downloading the audio file, not the Word document of the transcript.

Metadata: I found this to be very good for all the formats. Roy Tennant, eScholarship Web & Services Designer for the California Digital Library, advised KDL on the establishment of their metadata guidelines.

In the maps, one may browse by city, county, date, historical, and Sanborne. Each of these included title, date, description, creator, digital ID, and subject keywords. Images included title, inclusive dates, call number, creator, extent, language, and repository. The oral histories had the following metadata fields: title, date, collection, tape side, creator, interviewer, interviewee, and digital ID. The texts were full-text searchable, but the metadata fields were slightly less extensive, with just author, title, and publication date. Each hit did, however, show the key word in context (or KWIC).

Audience: This library is part of and linked from the Kentucky Virtual Library website, and the mission of the digital project is to ���enhance scholarship, research and lifelong learning���.