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Search the Special Collections and Archives Portal

About the Special Collections and Archives Portal

Search and access digital materials (known as digital objects), descriptions of materials in our archival collections (known as finding aids), or descriptions of the people and organizations documented in our collections. If you need help getting started, visit our the help page or learn more about UNLV Special Collections and Archives.

UNLV Special Collections and Archives collects, preserves, and provides access to rare and unique materials about UNLV, Las Vegas, Southern Nevada, and gaming to promote learning, discovery, and scholarship. All of our collections can be viewed in person in our reading room. Some of our collection materials have been digitized to provide access to researchers all over the world. Some of our materials have no physical counterpart and exist only in digital form. UNLV Special Collections and Archives uses a digital preservation policy that guides decision-making.

Technical Specifications

  • DAMS Infrastructure: This Portal was conceptualized to handle three aspects of digital asset management:
    • Preservation: Preserving digital assets using best practices and workflows that ensure long-term stewardship
    • Access: Providing appropriate levels of public access to a digital library including digital objects (re-formatted items from the collections and born-digital materials) and metadata (archival metadata for collections, item-level metadata for objects, and agent metadata for people and organizations)
    • Reuse: Publishing UNLV’s unique collections as linked data for innovative uses and research
  • Metadata: The portal is built to align with FAIR data principles and several common metadata standards to encourage metadata creation that is: findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
    • UNLV has a local metadata application profiles that complies with Mountain West Digital Library and Digital Public Library of America profiles and OAI-PMH harvesting for aggregation
    • The repository also contains:
      • management tools for common controlled vocabularies (including workflows to propose, review and approve new terms)
      • URIs to describe things in the repository
      • Persistent identifiers (ARKs)
      • Administrative metadata to support a tiered approach to digital preservation actions
      • Metadata to define access and restrictions on certain types of materials (add restriction policy here).
    • Implementing Islandora (Fedora 4+ & Drupal 8+) as a digital asset management System to replace CONTENTdm enabled an evolution to RDF and linked data triples for our data. A SPARQL endpoint is planned for future development.
  • For Developers

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