USC Libraries Confront the Future
The university libraries, with the support of other parts of the Information Services Division, support many digital initiatives aimed at providing seamless access to information of every kind. The ultimate goal of developing and expanding digital access, and the ability of users to manage it, is to provide "one stop shopping," regardless of information format, for students, faculty and other researchers. What are referred to as "digital activities" include relatively small projects, such as those to convert catalog records to a data format that will allow cross searching with more recently developed data to major infrastructure development, as the university moves to establish an institutional repository. The digital information environment is continuously evolving, and the libraries maintain a strong commitment to keeping pace with and providing leadership for new developments.
Among its many digital activities are the following several that reflect USC's involvement in national and international digital access efforts:
USC Digital Archive
Originated by USC, the USC Digital Archive contains more than 100,000 high quality digital images of unique materials with metadata to support research, and provides a "gateway" to resources on Los Angeles and Southern California. A portion of the images contained in the Digital Archive come from the collections of collaborating institutions which, like USC, have valuable archival collections related to the history and culture of the region; the university's powerful infrastructure provides a host environment for our partners.
InscriptiFact Project
The InscriptiFact Project is a database designed to allow access via the Internet to high-resolution images of ancient inscriptions from the Near Eastern and Mediterranean Worlds. The target inscriptions are some of the earliest written records in the world from an array of international museums and libraries and field projects where inscriptions still remain in situ. Included are, for example, Dead Sea Scrolls; cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia and Canaan; papyri from Egypt; inscriptions on stone from Jordan, Lebanon and Cyprus; Hebrew, Aramaic, Ammonite and Edomite inscriptions on a variety of hard media (e.g., clay sherds, copper, semi-precious stones, jar handles); and Egyptian scarabs.
Shoah Foundation Visual History Project
The Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive comprises nearly 52,000 videotaped interviews with witnesses to the Holocaust. These testimonies, which were conducted in 32 different languages and in 56 different countries, have been indexed and digitized and provide a unique educational and research resource.
Electronic Resources
The libraries maintain a large and ever-growing body of electronic resources, which include very large aggregator databases, reference tools, and discipline-specific resources for every area of study.