Case Study -- The Costume Designs of Dunya Ramicova

 

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Dunya Ramicova has designed costumes for major productions at the Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House in London, and other artistic venues around the world. She decided to give the Library her original costume designs and production files, which span her over 30-year career. Her gift arrangement provided for the digitization of the originals in order to make the collection available to a wider public. 

 

 

The Library worked with Professor Ramicova to archive nearly 2,000 renderings from over ninety productions, including housing them for long-term preservation and capturing documentation about the productions. The Library, with the assistance of a student assistant hired specifically for this project, worked on converting the descriptions she provided into a metadata schema. Concurrently, the Library scanned the renderings using an oversized flatbed scanner. When the metadata was complete and all the designs scanned, the Library worked with the California Digital Library to ingest the newly created content into a Digital Assets Management System (DAMS) and make the entire collection available to the public on the Calisphere website as well as the Digital Public Library of America. 

 

 

The public at large now has the opportunity to browse a visually rich collection of drawings by an Emmy Award-winning, founding faculty member of UC Merced. The original drawings are permanently housed in the Library’s Special Collections, and the collection as a whole is still being enhanced with new materials documenting the productions.