Digital Collections
Ibali is the Digital Collections platform for building and showcasing digital cultural heritage collections at the University of Cape Town.
Ibali is the Digital Collections platform at the University of Cape Town and runs on a local instance of the Omeka S publishing platform.
What does ibali offer?
Ibali is powered by Omeka S, an open-source web publishing platform for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums that are interested in connecting digital cultural heritage collections with other resources online.
Its power lies in linked open data:
- Describe and connect elements of (and between) collections semantically using metadata standards.
- Publishing collections with linked open data connects them with other resources online.
- Improve cultural heritage discovery through search engines and allow deeper explorations of underlying narratives.
Showcase your next Digital Humanities Project
Many Digital Humanities projects strive towards some form of presentation and publishing.
Ibali is the most suitable place for collections with lots of media and interrelated content. The platform design improves the user experience by elevating the content and enabling narrative experiences with digital objects.
Project examples
- Transcribe early copies of South African newspapers so the text can be analysed.
- Develop a database organised site to showcase the rehearsal process of theatre production.
- Build a linked collection of media related to endangered African languages.
Digital Collections at UCT Libraries
UCT Libraries Digital Collections represent a selection of material available through UCT’s archival holdings, primarily held in UCT Libraries Special Collections, but also gathered through academic field recordings, primary data collation and UCT departmental collections.
Transitioning from the old UCT Digital Collections platform to ibali
As part of an extensive review done in 2018/2019 of existing infrastructure for showcasing Digital Collections online, UCT Libraries (through DLS, Special Collections and Discovery Services) decided to retire the Libraries’ Islandora Fedora platform, and move to ibali which runs on a locally hosted Omeka S publishing server, in conjunction with a locally installed IIIF media server. This project is underway.
As part of an extensive review done in 2018/2019 of existing infrastructure for showcasing Digital Collections online, UCT Libraries (through DLS, Special Collections and Discovery Services) decided to retire the Libraries’ Islandora Fedora platform, and move to ibali which runs on a locally hosted Omeka S publishing server, in conjunction with a locally installed IIIF media server. This project is underway.