ORONO – The University of Maine System Libraries have brought online a newly developed, searchable database for public use to support the education, research and public service mission of the universities.

The Gateway to Digital Collections provides online access to thousands of selected materials in all formats – full text, image, sound, video and finding aids. These materials come from the special collections of the UMS Libraries and other cultural institutions in Maine.

More than 7,000 electronic books are in Maine’s Netlibrary collection and the Project Gutenberg collection – public domain titles. The e-books are accessible to all Maine citizens. This resource includes options to browse the title lists of each collection.

The Gateway includes access to the full text electronic theses and dissertations database, which indexes University of Maine doctoral dissertations, 1964 to the present, and masters’ theses from 1876 to the present. Many of the records provide abstracts and links to the full-text documents. An electronic copy of the dissertation or thesis is automatically deposited in the database; retrospective documents are scanned on a per need basis. Access to a limited number of full-text documents may be restricted to UMaine faculty, staff and students, as required by the author. Access to these documents will now be available as part of the Gateway to Digital Collections.

Digital images of works of art may be viewed online in the Carr Collection, a subset of the Museum Collection held by the University of Maine Museum of Art. The Carr Online Gallery contains digital surrogates of the nearly 300 modern and contemporary prints that comprise the collection. The gift of Robert Venn Carr Jr., Class of 1944, the collection includes works by Pablo Picasso, Josef Albers, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Joan Miro and Robert Delaunay, and a collection of nearly 90 paintings and World War II political cartoons by William Gropper.

The Maine Music Box is an interactive multimedia digital music library. Through the new database, users may view images of sheet music scores and cover art, play back audio renditions – MIDI files – and manipulate the arrangement of selected pieces by changing the key and instrumentation – Scorch files. A few titles contain streaming video renditions. The sheet music collection consists of some 22,000 pieces of historical and popular sheet music published and widely played from the mid-nineteenth century until approximately 1990. Most of the collections are from the Bagaduce Music Lending Library in Blue Hill.

The University of Maine System Libraries are among early library developers of a system to manage the data and associated digital resources. The system and software supporting the Gateway to Digital Collections provides the libraries with the ability to store large digital resources, such as e-books, sound, video and spatial data sets, manage access and integrate the data across collections. Using this technology, Gateway users may search digital resources in special collections at all the campus libraries, from any network connection, and be linked to the document on the local Web site.

“The Gateway unlocks the doors to unique, digital resources in the libraries’ collections, and broadens access to support an interactive education program,” said Joyce Rumery, dean of Fogler Library.

Visit the UMS Libraries Gateway to Digital Collections at http://libraries.maine.edu/

gateway.