After a longer time than I anticipated, my project is nearing completion and I’m beginning to post more actively here. The project on which I’ve been working is a collaborative project with the Center for Global Christianity and Mission and Professor Dana Robert. We’ve been creating a repository of biographical information and digitized books to support the study of the History of Christian Missions. This is particularly focused on the class she is teaching this semester (thus the pressure to complete it), but we hope it will have much broader value.

The Web site is up and in production. In the next few days, we will be loading additional books (currently the collection contains 163) as well as additional biographical material for the missionaries. The class can interact with the materials through a blog and through comments.

For those interested in the technical components, This site is created with a content management system called Joomla. We have used that as a wrapper for a digital repository of the e-books created with the Greenstone Digital Library software developed by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato, and developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO. The digitized books have been cataloged, with records added to OCLC and loaded into the Boston University Libraries OPAC.

The digital objects have been loaded both into our DSpace repository and the Greenstone repository. The Library is continues to evaluate both digital repositories. Digital objects and metadata can be easily transferred from one to the other. We like the user interface of the Greenstone repository for the end user, but like many of the features of DSpace as well.

Chris Spalding, our Digital Collections Librarian, has played a major role in developing the Web site. We’ll continue to report on its use and appreciate constructive feedback about the project.

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