Category: Uncategorized

Exciting technical updates in the IDHH!

In order to improve our internal workflows, the IDHH migrated to a new aggregation server in the October 2024 quarterly harvest. If your library is a contributor to the IDHH, you do not need to do anything to your collections, metadata, or your OAI feed. The IDHH will continue our usual workflow, where we harvest and aggregate collection metadata from all contributing institutions into a single stream of metadata for DPLA to ingest into the DPLA and IDHH catalogs.

However, this migration will change direct links to item records in the DPLA and IDHH sites (for example, a URL like https://idhh.dp.la/item/7bcdb6b16968d22a6457bbffbfa7d1fd). While it is unlikely, if you have any direct links in your social media or websites to specific items using DPLA or IDHH URLs, you will need to update them now that the October harvest has concluded.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to the IDHH with any questions!

My Name is Tath Haver. I’m a Graduate Student at the School of Information Sciences at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Graduate Assistant working closely with the Illinois Digital Heritage Hub, and now one of the authors of the Illinois Highlights blog.

I’m working on maintaining and increasing the IDHH’s visibility, in part by authoring posts on the blog, developing new site features, and participating in broader hub outreach as ways to encourage access. I will also be assisting in assessing the metadata from our partner’s contributions and assisting in user testing.

Searching through our partner’s digital collections, I’m especially interested in the ways people have documented their civic and everyday lives in Illinois. I’m curious about how their everyday lives reflected their community at a specific point in history, and how this hyper-locality is something that can be highlighted, learned about, and celebrated throughout every part of Illinois. What was a parade in the 1920s like? How did people document their new lawnmower, corn combine, or house?  How did communities make sense of changes and stories in their town and across the state?

I’m looking forward to sharing what I find with you as I continue to work through our collections and build a better picture of Illinois. If there are ever any topics you’d like to see highlighted, or if anything else seems exciting, please make full use of the comments section below.