Friday July 31, 2009

-- LUNA: A Better Way to View Digital Collections
-- Featured LUNA Collection
-- LUNAcommons.org Sets the Stage
-- Coming Soon: Annotations and Personal Content
-- In Development: Book Reader
-- Book Digitization
-- Growing Community
-- Upcoming Conference Opportunities

LUNA: A Better Way to View Digital Collections

Released just over a year ago, LUNA is Luna Imaging’s dynamic new web based front end offering an unprecedented way to work with digital content. By focusing our development goals on improving the end-user experience LUNA allows users to not only find specific content but also to discover new content. LUNA also encourages creativity and collaboration through a rich variety of end-user tools.

Keep collections in LUNA private or open them up to a larger audience, it’s your choice. LUNA’s flexible architecture opens up a new world of possibilities for old world content. We’ve redefined the landscape for digital collections and made them accessible to all. Learn more.

Featured LUNA Collection: Images from the History of Medicine

Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) provides access to nearly 70,000 images in the collections of the History of Medicine Division (HMD) of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). The collection is now available to the public in our new LUNA browser at www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/ihm/.

The collection includes portraits, caricatures, posters and graphic arts illustrating the social and historical aspects of medicine dated from the 15th to 21st century.

LUNAcommons.org sets the stage

While every release is special, the Insight + LUNA v6.2 release on May 15 represented a significant milestone in that it concludes the development of the LUNA Commons and ‘sets the stage’ for our clients to share and receive LUNA collections. The benefit of this new resource is that it allows institutions to centrally organize both their collections as well as other public LUNA collections, allowing users one point of entry across all. While most other collection building tools create isolated collections we’ve built a system which allows institutions to easily share and promote their public collections.

Coming Soon: Annotations and Personal Content

Our end of summer LUNA release will support the ability to create and share annotations. Annotations can be text based or include an embedded widget to associate a range of media types including YouTube videos or Google Maps.

LUNA users can already add content from Flickr through the External Media Search feature but with this upcoming release they will also be able to add content from their desktop directly into LUNA.

In Development: Book Reader

Development is now underway to add significant functionality to the LUNA browser. Within the next few months we will demonstrate this new feature by partnering with the Internet Archive to showcase a historic collection of books through the integration of the Archive’s Open Source Book Viewer.

Book Digitization

Our Digital Imaging Services (DIS) aren’t just about image collections. We also digitize text based collections comprised of both bound and unbound materials. Contact us for a quote and to learn more about the wide range of Preservation and Access Capture services we offer.

Growing Community

We are pleased to welcome the following new clients to the Insight Community: Carnegie Mellon University, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Davidson College, Fort Larned Historical Society, Wellesley College, University of Thessaly, and Samos Island Archive.

Visit Luna at Upcoming Conferences

We look forward to seeing you in November where we’ll be in Denver for the Educause Annual Conference, The Best Thinking in Higher Ed IT. We’ll also be in Portland for Museum Computer Network’s Annual Conference, Museum Information, Museum Efficiency: Doing More with Less!

Let’s Talk: Summer Schedules

We are happy to schedule appointments to talk about your digital imaging needs and to review the new features in the LUNA interface to our Insight Software Suite- it's never too early to plan for future projects!

To schedule an appointment, please contact sales@lunaimaging.com or call 1.800.452.LUNA (5862).