Accessing Manchester Digital Collections
An introduction to MDC
Introduction
Manchester Digital Collections is one of our two digital repositories, the other being the Library Digitised Collections (LUNA). Both host digitised material from the University of Manchester Special Collections. There are a number of feature collections in each repository. New material is presently being added to MDC, and we are busy migrating many of our collections too. LUNA will continue to host digital content so understanding how it works as a resource is also useful.
MDC allows enhanced viewing and manipulation of ultra-high quality images, with parallel display of text, audio and video content. Using MDC, academics can curate digital editions of important items from the collections, contextualising them and bringing their research on the collections to a wider audience
The MDC landing page offers highlights from recently added collections. In addition you can see all the collections in the Browse section.
You can use the Simple and Advanced Search to find specific results.
Object view — once you have found the specific item there are a few key things to help you navigate:
- Our website URLs have the format: https://www.digitalcollections.manchester.ac.uk/view/[item id]/[image number]. So https://www.digitalcollections.manchester.ac.uk/view/PR-INCU-18313/19 links to image 19 in item PR-INCU-18313 (Petrarch, Canzoniere e Trionfi, 1482).
- The right panel, which shows some information about the item can be collapsed by clicking on the three bars icon in the middle of the screen. This will allow you to view more of the image while you can still page forward and backwards through the book. There is also a button within the image viewer that allows you to expand it to full screen.
- Using the Thumbnails view can help to find a specific page in the item.
- You can see the full item metadata or transcription, if it is available, by selecting ‘View more options’.
MDC is fully IIIF compliant which means that you can use Mirador, or another IIIF viewer, to view and compare items. You can find more help on using IIIF here:
Video: using Manchester Digital Collections
Below is a video that takes you through the basics of using Manchester Digital Collections:
Images reproduced with the permission of The John Rylands University Librarian and Director of the University of Manchester Library. All images used on this page are licenced via CC-BY-NC-SA, for further information about each image, please follow the link in the caption description.
