Marcel Breuer Digital Archive
by Deirdre Joyce, Head of Digital Stewardship and the Digital Library
As part of the Libraries’ recent migration to its new digital asset manager and collections platform, the Marcel Breuer Digital Archive (MBDA) moved to its new home on the Quartex platform this past spring. This important digital collection is still accessed via the same url (https://breuer.syr.edu/), but it now has a somewhat different look and feel, as well as some new functionality that is powered by the recent change.
It’s important to note that the content (i.e., the digital objects) is the same as that found in the previous incarnation. With close to 80,000 objects (and more than 130,000 files), the content from MBDA more than tripled the Libraries’ managed digital object footprint. This was the fourth (and largest) migration of digital content undertaken by the Libraries’ Department of Digital Stewardship (DDS) after migrating the Ted Koppel Collection last Fall, the Plastics Collection earlier this year, and the primary SU Libraries Digital Collections website, which officially launched in in the spring. The last full site migration from the Digital Library was Our Stories, which also migrated to the new platform at the end of June. In addition to those bespoke sites, DDS transferred a few more significant collections into the primary site, such as the Belfer Latin American 45s Collection and the Belfer Cylinders Digital Connection, also at the end of June. As of today, all SU Digital Collections are represented on the new platform.
The migration of the MBDA to Quartex is just the beginning of a new life for this important, high use collection. Already, we’ve been able to introduce new ways for researchers to engage with materials, including category-based browsing using list-landing pages (see Projects by Name, Project Types, and Archival Series) as well as enhanced searching with search categories. Both functionalities are derived from existing controlled vocabularies. Going forward, the platform’s robust digital asset management tools will allow us to better analyze and improve existing description. At the same time, we are really excited to experiment with some of the platform’s emerging exhibit tools and digital scholarship integrations to both model and encourage the creative use and reuse of these materials.
For those unfamiliar with the genesis of the MBDA, this was a significant digitization project for the Libraries which began back in 2009 and first appeared online in 2012. That project digitized the entirety of the Marcel Breuer Papers at Syracuse University as well as invited content from a number of partner institutions. The idea was to give researchers doing work on Breuer a “one stop shop” where Breuer-related content could be discovered. Originally, the project was funded (in part) by several grants to the Libraries from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The most recent project was accomplished through collaboration between the Department of Digital Stewardship, the Special Collections Research Center, and Library Information Technology Services.