History of System Development

System origins

OLIVIA grew out of the work done by the Visual Resources Task Group in the spring of 1997. The group's report made clear that the level of automation support available to visual collections varied dramatically from collection to collection, and that very few libraries had access to the kind of systems needed to manage their image collections. This need, together with the increasing numbers of digital imaging projects with similar cataloging needs, led to the planning for a central system to support image cataloging. The new system, OLIVIA, would be based on a cataloging system developed for the Fine Arts Library, Harvard College and the Loeb Library, Graduate School of Design, would be supported by the HUL Office for Information Systems, and would be made available for use by visual collections across the university.

A Steering Committee was established and charged with generalizing the existing system to meet the needs of a wide range of image collections. Since OLIVIA is a union database, all participants use the same record structures. (However, not all parts of the record structures are applicable in every repository.)  Due to the shared nature of the file, participants must work together to agree on best practices and on common controlled vocabulary. This work, performed by and for the Steering Committee is ongoing.  In addition, the Steering Committee oversees the functional development of the system.

Early developments

In the first phase of systems development, the Steering Committee altered OLIVIA to support the data model developed for the VIA catalog, which had been designed to accommodate diverse cataloging from archives, museums, and study image collections. In the second phase, system development added the ability to associate digital images, stored in the Harvard Digital Repository or in local directories, with corresponding OLIVIA records, to display the images in OLIVIA, and to export thumbnail images and links to VIA as appropriate. Further developments have included functional enhancements based on users' experience with the system. The Steering Committee, now named OLIVIA Working Group, is continuing to oversee the development of the system and the inclusion of new participants.