Welcome

Cloche (Columbia Library's Online Collections and Heterogeneous E-Reserves) is Columbia College Chicago's digital library. Cloche augments the Library's physical holdings and electronic resources by providing access to networked, searchable, and scholarly resources for classroom teaching, student study, and research.

Library Digital Collections collaborates with individual academic departments and faculty by assisting with the planning, digitization, description and access to digital material for teaching purposes.

Designed for sustainability and preservation, Cloche also holds digitized and born-digital material from the Columbia College Chicago Archives.

Technologically, Cloche is a custom-built front-end application for the Library's installation of Fedora, a flexible digital repository architecture and software that focuses on the long-term management and preservation of digital resources while simultaneously providing services to facilitate the publishing and sharing of those resources.

Columbia's digital library relies exclusively on open source technologies.