Digital Collection: Rare and Unique Materials
The NC State University Libraries' Digital Collections: Rare and Unique Materials serves as a gateway to tens of thousands of images, text, and digital media from its rich holdings.
Overview
From the history of NC State to the history of North Carolina's built environment, these digital collections provide network access to collections that drive research, highlight innovation, and inspire learning.
How We Did It
NC State University Libraries Digital Collections: Rare and Unique Materials is a Ruby on Rails application utilizing the Blacklight plugin for Solr-powered search. The application reuses the MySQL and Solr databases managed by the Special Collections Asset Management System. The application uses Google Analytics to track many user interaction events to gain a better understanding of how the pages are being used. This application was an early adopter of HTML5 Microdata and Schema.org for exposing embedded, structured data and improving discoverability on the open web. Other technologies used include jQuery and IIIF.
