About
This platform highlights cultural heritage collections in a digital format that are held by Stony Brook University (SBU) Libraries or are collections curated by the Stony Brook University community that SBU Libraries manage. Resources found on this site include both objects that have been digitized and born-digital objects. Objects digitized reflect various types of analog formats including, but not limited to: photographs, manuscripts, documents, artifacts, ephemera, and audio and video records. Born digital objects consist of images, text, audio-visual files, and oral history components, including audio, visual, and text transcripts, among other formats.
Stony Brook University Digital Collections are created to provide access to cultural heritage materials worldwide to its research community, both SBU affiliates and researchers with internet access. The collections on this site were built to support the SBU teaching community and students as a way to enhance their research and scholarship and are built in relation to the SBU Libraries overall collection development policy. A digital collection development policy is forthcoming.
Please see the Terms of Use page for more information about our right to make these digital objects available in this online exhibition platform and how you may use them.
Researchers using this site may come across restricted items that require SBU credentials to access. Anyone with issues or concerns about access should contact us.
SBU Libraries Digital Collections on this digital projects platform include historical information, some from primary resources, raw news footage, and ephemera, among other resources. Materials in the University Libraries’ Digital Collections should be evaluated in the context of the period in which they were originally created. The University Libraries do not endorse views expressed in any resource content on this site except where explicitly stated. All concerns regarding the content on this site should be immediately reported for assessment. Information on privacy and ethics, including takedown requests, can be found on our Terms of Use Page.
Digitization
The Stony Brook University Libraries Digital Lab uses an array of scanners and tools to create digital resources from analog objects. Some equipment includes flatbed scanners with transparency hoods, an overhead photography copy stand, a 35mm slide scanner, a large format feeder scanner, and a book scanner. Obsolete audio/video formats are mainly outsourced for digitization.
SBU Libraries Digital Lab follows Library of Congress Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) for files the libraries create or has created via a vendor; Specifically, Guidelines: Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials from the FADGI Still Image Working Group. Access files are presented on this site.
Digital files submitted by collaborators outside of the libraries do not always meet these standards and guidelines. In many cases, the file received is an access copy, not a high-resolution or high-quality one.
Description
This site uses Dublin Core Metadata Terms from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative for its organization and guidelines for the metadata/description provided for each item record. Occasionally field labels are changed to represent certain works. An example of this is for Oral History Collection items where the metadata field label changed from Creator to Narrator and Contributor to Interviewer.
Personnel
Collection-specific personnel and their contact info are not listed here but with their collections.
The list of usual suspects who build these collections are:
Digital Projects Librarian
Senior Programmer Analyst
Preservation Librarian
Multimedia Resources Specialist
Digital Lab Technicians
Metadata Librarian
This digital project and exibition site is built on Omeka S, an open source web publishing platform.