Technologies
The UF Digital Collections are powered by the open source SobekCM software engine and suite of associated tools. The associated tools include online user tools and standalone software for use in digitizing and curating born digital materials. The online system is deployed with Solr and other technologies for optimal functionality.
Because of the highly visual nature of so many items, the pages are displayed as zoomable images (through a JPG2000 server) and all can be browsed as thumbnails at the item and the collection level. Artifacts with multiple photos from multiple angles can be seen in motion, rotating in an Adobe Flash video view, and items can be searched by their geographic information (city, county, state, latitude and longitude) or viewed on a map through UFDC's use of the Google Maps API.
Additionally, UFDC hosts record-only collections like the Catalog of Digital Historical Newspapers (NewspaperCat) which is a tool facilitating the discovery of online digitized historical newspaper content. The records for the newspapers are all searchable and browsable within NewspaperCat. Further, NewspaperCat only includes records for fully and freely available newspapers. NewspaperCat was developed from a grant from the UF Libraries to serve the reference need for finding historical newspapers from around the US and the world.
Read more about this topic: University Of Florida Digital Collections