A Few Selected Federated Collections

What makes a good federated collection?

• Description of who, what & why about the collection including well-documented, clearly written information about contributing (or harvested) collections and criteria or standards for inclusion.
• Options for searching and/or browsing at different levels, with limit functions built in.
• Current / up-to-date
• Authoritativeness

The following three "service providers" meet these criteria for the most part. The only exception is the out-of-date / non-current nature (as far as I can tell) of the Sheet Music Consortium site.

Sheet Music Consortium

The UCLA Digital Library Program serves as the host for a database of harvested metadata for open access digitized sheet music. This initiative is being developed by four participating institutions in the consortium: UCLA, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University. In addition, the Library of Congress Music Division, the National Library of Australia and the “Maine Music Box” at the University of Maine have metadata that has been harvested. The Consortium site also provides a list (“Sheet Music on the Web”) of other web sites and institutions that have sheet music collections. The site provides basic search, browse, and advanced search options. The site does not appear to be active. The last date I see for page updates are 2003. Nevertheless, the service is useful and easy to use. I searched (using the Advanced Search) for records with the keyword “cowboy*” and selected “Digitized Sheet Music Only”. This retrieved 14 metadata records. (When I did not include the limit “Digitized Sheet Music Only”, the result was 80 records.) One of the records I pulled up was for “Pony Maid” and the lyrics start out “In Arizona there lives a maid, loved by a great big Cowboy…”!

OISter

Describing their service as a “union catalog of digital resources”. Their focus is “useful, academically-oriented” digital resources. As of Nov. 19, 2008, OISter provides access to 18,530,232 records from 1039 contributors (including SIRLS’ DLIST, the Arizona Memory Project, the UA Libraries Special Collections). There is no browse option. The search function provides options to search within fields, limit by resource type and sort. I like how the results page allows you to see the results grouped by data contributor. A search on Arizona and cowboy* in the subject field resulted in 173 records from 8 different collections (including Arizona Memory Project and the NAU Colorado Plateau Digital Archives). This is a robust, up to date and well-maintained site.

National Science Digital Library

From the FAQ for the National Science Digital Library – “As of September 2008, NSDL contained 153 unique collections of resources and over 2 million records… NSDL collections and services are selected from high quality providers of scientific and technical materials that are accurate and appropriate for educational settings. Consequently, NSDL's search results are drawn only from this body of pre-selected materials.” The NSDL search allows you to select a variety of limits, including audience, resource format, grade level, subject and “pathway” (an audience-specific views of selected NSDL resources – or portal). There is a browse collections option, either “all collections” or within broad subject categories (biological & health; geosciences, mathematics, etc.) – and within those categories the option to focus on research or education collections. I did a search using the keywords “cowboy*” and “ranch*” and limited to k-12. I got 3 results. When I searched “Arizona” and “ranch*” as a general search, I got 55 results, many of which were scholarly, scientific articles. This is an authoritative flexible, well-supported service provider with lots of depth as well as breadth.

Cataloging my Digital Collection

It has been decades(!) since I took cataloging courses for my Master's in Library Science. (I graduated in 1979.) My career has been spent on the "public service" / reference side of things. Even so, in recent years with the various digital projects I've been involved with (Rangelands West, etc.) I've begun to become more aware of and involved in issues of metadata - but not really at the nitty-gritty design & input level. All of this is leading up to my observations regarding the challenges I've faced in cataloging my IRLS 675 digital collection. I've found it to be very time-consuming and somewhat tedious in spite of the interest I have in the subject area of the items I am working with. I am using the LOC subject terms in the Eprints collection but they are not particularly useful since they are at such a high/broad level. I think for my collection I prefer the key words and tagging approach since it allows a much more "granular" level of description.

On the question of consistency, since I'm working with such a small collection and it's only one person (me) doing the cataloging, it's fairly easy to create consistent metadata records. Even so, I feel like an amateur. I would benefit from more recent education from cataloging and/or archivist course work. I can see how it becomes much more difficult when you have many people entering metadata for a collection, especially when they have little or no background in the theory and practice of cataloging.

Select and Install a Drupal Module of My Choice

[IRLS 675 Unit 5 - Assignment 2/5]
After adding and configuring the selected Drupal modules as instructed in Unit 5 – Assignment 1, I spent quite a bit of time browsing through the available modules with distributions for Drupal 6 (Assignment 2). I thought I might want to use the Tagadelic module but decided that it wouldn’t really fit with the style/atmosphere of the UA Historic Photos collection – too “messy”. I considered some image-related modules. The PicLens module is really cool but I suspect that it’s too complex for me to download and install at least given the time (or lack thereof) that I have for this. Finally I decided to download Google Analytics. The download process went smoothly but when I got to the Site Configuration page in Admin for Google Analytics, I ran into a dead-end with the Google Analytics account number. Since my Pfander Drupal site is apparently not accessible to the WWW (at least with the IP address), I couldn’t get a valid URL response from Google. I’ve probably forgotten the URL or whatever that would be acceptable for the Google Analytics registration page. At this point, it's late, I"m tired and so far behind in everything...I’m going to put this on hold and keep moving on the assignments, etc. and maybe come back to this assignment later.