Background

Yale University Library’s YDC (Yale Digital Commons) Steering Committee formed in March of 2010 created the Images Group Steering Committee in April of 2010 charged with the task to develop procedures and protocols for transferring Yale University Library system to the DAM (variously referred to as Media Manager or Artesia) hosted by ODAI. They also needed a way to bag and transfer descriptive and administrative metadata associated with each digital object from a collection management system to other systems within the technical infrastructure of the Library and/or the wider environment of the University (DAM, website such as the Library Digital Collections, or preservation repository (Fedora)).

The Images Group needed to solve two problems: (1) What metadata should be bagged and transferred and (2) technically, how do we do it? In solving these problems, they needed to take into consideration that the Yale Library system consists of 18 departments, each having their own work flows, digitization plans, patron expectations, and source materials.
The subcommittee was chaired by Rebekah Irwin formerly at the Beinecke, tasked with solving metadata issues and Mike (Michael) Friscia, programmer analyst from Library Technical Services, tasked with solving the technical infrastructure issues. Soon Jay (James) Terray, programmer analyst from the Beinecke joined the team to co-develop the technical aspects of the project.
To accommodate the needs across a range of departments, they decided that a desktop application would require too much customization and decided to go with a web-based application. However, the LadyBird Toolkit, (a metadata editing program) is a desktop application supervised by departmental administrators to edit controlled vocabularies, such as personal and corporate names and topic headings.

LadyBird, as the emerging program was named, would solve the critical problem of migrating the individual, or siloed, digital collections developed locally in each department to a centralized system and, in the process, provide an opportunity to normalize metadata and digital asset production across the system while still accommodating the specific workflows and production across the system while still accommodating the specific workflows and production requirements of each department. For the Library’s patron, the LadyBird infrastructure would improve the discovery of digital assets across our growing collections of digital resources.