The Library Technologies division of the Indiana University Libraries leads and participates in a number of research and development projects aimed at creating new digital services and capabilities for libraries at IU and beyond.

Current Projects:

Audiovisual Metadata Platform (AMP)

Avalon Media System

Open Source:

The IU Libraries have created or contributed to many open source software projects that can be used by other organizations and individuals. Much of the source code for these projects is available through Github:

Past Projects:

Digital Audio Archives Project (DAAP) (2002-2007)
Using the performance archive of the Indiana University Cook Music Library as a test bed, the goal of DAAP was to reduce the cost of building a digital audio library. The project designed and created an effective and economical workflow management system for digitizing analog audio tapes and building a web-accessible digital audio library. This project was funded by an IMLS National Leadership Grant as a partnership with Johns Hopkins University.

Digital Libraries Education Program (2004-2007)
Indiana University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign received funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Science (IMLS) to create the first research-based, comprehensive master's-level and post-MLS degrees focusing on digital libraries. (SLIS Digital Library specializations for the MLS and MIS.)

EVIA Digital Archive (2002-2009)
Supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the EVIA Digital Archive Project was a collaborative effort of Indiana University and the University of Michigan, led on the IU side by the Archives of Traditional Music, to establish a repository of ethnographic video recordings and an infrastructure of tools and systems supporting scholars in the ethnographic disciplines. With a special focus on the fields of ethnomusicology, folklore, anthropology, and dance ethnology, Project developers created a set of tools and systems for use by scholars and instructors as well as librarians and archivists. The primary mission of the EVIA Project is to preserve ethnographic field video created by scholars as part of their research. The secondary mission is to make those materials available in conjunction with rich, descriptive annotations, creating a unique resource for scholars, instructors, and students. Project staff and contributors have created a support system and a suite of software tools for video annotation, online collection searching, controlled vocabulary and thesaurus maintenance, peer review, and technical metadata collection.

Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative (MDPI) (2015-2021)
IU launched the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative (MDPI) in 2015, beginning a six-year journey to complete the ambitious challenge of digitally preserving significant audio, video, and film assets and making them available to scholars all over the world. It became the largest university-led media preservation project in the United States and one of the largest in the world. By all accounts, the initiative concluded as a success with more than 350,000 items digitized and stored for posterity.

METS Navigator
METS Navigator is a METS-based (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) system developed by the Indiana University Digital Library Program for displaying and navigating sets of page images or other multi-part digital objects.

Sakaibrary: Integrating Licensed Library Resources with Sakai (2006-2008)
With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Indiana University and the University of Michigan created software that enabled faculty and students to more easily use online journals and databases within their courses. Tools developed as a result of this grant linked full-text library resources to the Sakai collaboration and learning software environment.

Sound Directions (2007-2009)
Sound directions developed best practices and tested emerging standards for archival audio preservation and storage in the digital domain in order to preserve critically endangered, highly valuable, unique field recordings of extraordinary national interest.

Variations2 Digital Music Library (2000-2005)
Supported by a Digital Libraries Initiative - Phase 2 grant from the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, the Variations2 research project focused on establishing a digital music library test bed system containing music in a variety of formats, and supported research and development in the areas of system architecture, metadata, network services, music pedagogy, usability, human-computer interaction, and intellectual property rights.

Variations3 Digital Music Library (2005-2009)
Supported by an IMLS National Leadership Grant, Variations3 allowed Indiana University to extend its digital music library to college teachers and students across the country.

Variations/FRBR (2008-2012)
Supported by an IMLS National Leadership Grant, the Variations/FRBR development project built on Indiana University's expertise in digital music libraries and the well-known Variations digital music library system, and provided a concrete testbed for the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) conceptual model. The project was focused on testing FRBR in a real-world environment, and on providing data, code, and system design specifications that could be re-used by others interested in FRBR.