Oxford University is internationally renowned for its scholarly library collections, and in particular for those of the Bodleian Library which has been a library of deposit for almost 400 years. The University has a long tradition in digital scholarship and there are a number of completed library projects focusing on the digitization of primary resources.

Although these collections are widely used, there is a clear demand for a closer integration of discrete collections of this kind. The ODL aims to offer a Digital Library architecture which will allow centralized access to digital resources, both those it creates itself and those acquired from outside. The use of established standards for descriptive metadata (i.e. EAD, TEI) is a precondition for this integration process. Existing digital library collections may be transferred step by step into a common architecture with an integrated retrieval mechanism.

List of Digital Collections Online