TCDL 2025

Re-engineering Search in FromThePage
By: Sara Brumfield & Ben Brumfield

Searching archival collections across diverse institutions is challenging. Volunteers, genealogists, and librarians each have unique needs, from locating relevant crowdsourcing projects to tracing ancestral names or finding specific documents via metadata and call numbers. Our collections range from untranscribed scans to fully indexed texts enhanced by OCR and HTR systems, LLMs, or manual efforts.

This webinar will explain how we consolidated five distinct MySQL-backed search functionalities into a single search engine while still respecting organization scope and privacy restrictions.

Highlights include:

Rationale: Insights from user feedback and group meetings that prompted the integration.
Live Demo: Explore the new range of searches, from site-wide project discovery to detailed searches within an organization’s collections.
Challenges: Addressing issues like line-spanning words, markup variations, and multilingual content.
Emerging Issues: Adjusting to a unified search that demands detailed context for each result.
Results and Process: How last summer’s analytics led to surprising insights, user stories, and the development of a new product requirement document.
Future Possibilities: Opportunities for thematic, cross-institutional search portals.

Using Alma/Primo for Digital Collection Discovery and Access
By: Melanie Cofield & Misu Kim

This session focuses on demonstrating various ways academic libraries are leveraging the Alma/Primo Library Services Platform (LSP) to support digital collection discovery and access.

Over the last couple of decades, the go-to solutions for digital collection management and access among TDL members have been open source digital repository platforms and products like Avalon, DSpace, Islandora, and Samvera. A more recent development is the wide adoption of the Alma/Primo LSP among TDL member institutions. This is a product developed and hosted by Ex Libris, and the features within this platform to support digital collection management, discovery, access, and preservation are rapidly expanding.

As Alma/Primo becomes an integral part of our digital collection landscape, it seems timely to discuss how this system’s features complement those of others, share various approaches currently being employed (such as digital collection migrations, metadata harvesting, etc.), and consider possibilities on the near horizon.