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#access2009pei – Cathy Hartman and Mark Phillips – The Portal to Texas History
3 Oct 09
Began mid 90s by pulling in a small, orphaned website: Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. Agency had 50+ years of publishing; became a burden for reference, docs, and ILL staff. Got some funding to outsource scanning of their periodical publications and started mounting them online as PDFs. This was the beginning of what migrated into the Portal project.
Wanted to help Texas libraries, museums, and cultural heritage organizations.
– Many small organizations wanted to put stuff online, but didn’t have the skills our resources.
– build online collections connecting like materials from many libraries/museums/archives.
– provide resources for educators: lesson plans and resources built on digitized history collection.
– provide single interface to heterogeneous collections.
– text and photographic materials, some video and audio
Knew external funding would be needed. Easier to obtain funding for site creation/improvement and content building when providing services to many organizations. Federal, State, and foundation funding was received.
More than 100 partners, 3 models:
– UNT does all the work (costs more!)
– Partners scan, create metadata; UNT puts online
– UNT scans, partners create metadata, UNT puts online
UNT then does quality assessment for models 2 and 3. Creating metadata is the most expensive part.
Infrastructure: IOGENE Project, an IMLS funded project. Rapid development framework for digi lib interfaces with genealogists as the target users. Focus on user centred interface design.
Wanted a lightweight public access system to digital content; easily scalable in content, number of requests, collections, partners, types of content. Using tools that have well established communities, using other people’s code as much as possible writing only the library stuff. All digital content in one big pot (no silos) using different interfaces to brand and manipulate sub sets.
METS, DC (locally qualified), Pairtree, BagIt, ARKs identifiers for public access metadata management. Archive backend a different set of tools.
Defined a digital object model, serialize to METS, use same object model for all document types, works for everything so far. Object structure is mapped to URLs. ARK identifiers map well to beautiful URLs. URLs become the API. Designers can make significant changes to interface without interacting with developers. Metadata editor adds ‘edit’ subdomain, easy click to fix errors when discovered.
68K objects, 60K more in the queue, possible 700K records from State agencies, even more from possible newspaper sources.
Adding partner services
– brandable interfaces
– partner’s domain names
– SRU/OpenSearch target for each partner/collection
– OAI-PMH repository for each
– new services are developed, added to the stack, benefit everyone
UNT benefits
– all “digital library” content in the same system
– build rich research collections for students, researchers, the community
Working on interface overhaul, beta is here, somewhat cleaner interface, focus on usability improvements; help guides available to reroute questions if needed.
Posted by pzed on October 3, 2009 at 8.09am
Categories: access 2009, conferences, libraries, twitter
