About The Digital Archives Project

Welcome to the Michigan Citizen Digital Archive.

Project Team

The project arose from the discussions between the University of Michigan Library and the Bentley Historical Library. The development team included a project manager, a data librarian, an archivist, two developers, a usability specialist, and a graphic artist. Additional staff worked on preparing, scanning and transforming the page images.

Technologies

The team selected Ruby on Rails as a technical framework that met the project needs and was a good fit with current Library technology directions. The Blacklight Ruby “gem” was chosen as the starting point for the project due to its support for searching and displaying data, its configurability and its production requirements.

The project selected the Open Seadragon Image viewer due to its powerful features (such as zooming) and its IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) compatibility.

Behind the pages you view is the Library’s Digital Library eXtension Service (DLXS) image storage system, which enabled us to quickly create a repository of page images for this project.