Developing digital library services to support Emblem studies

Scholars' expectations of digital libraries continue to evolve. Digital library services must advance in order to meet increasingly sophisticated expectations. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaf, the University of Illinois and the Herzog August Bibliothek are implementing new post-digitization workflows, testing advanced metadata architectures, and creating a new Open Emblem Portal to better meet the scholarly and pedagogical needs of the emblem studies community. This paper discusses the innovative approaches being developed and considers the implications of these digital library design advances in the broader context of Web 2.0 and Semantic Web initiatives.