implementation

Read/viewed:
Beth Yakel and Polly Reynolds, "The Next Generation Finding Aid..." Case study from New Skills for a Digital Era workshop, June 2006: http://rpm.lib.az.us/NewSkills/CaseStudies/8_Yakel_Reynolds.pdf
Helen Tibbo and Lokman Meho, "Finding Finding Aids on the World Wide Web," American Archivist Volume 64, Number 1 / Spring-Summer 2001
Creating the Next Generation of Archival Finding Aids http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may07/yakel/05yakel.html
Burt Altman and John Nemmers, "The Usability of On-line Archival Resources: The Polaris Finding Aid" American Archivist, vol 64 spring/summer 2001.

http://polarbears.si.umich.edu/
http://pepper.cpb.fsu.edu/collection/

(Note to Megan: I have not been posting as much as I would like--I've been moving across town--but I intend to pick up the pace from here on, and will keep working over spring break as well to make sure I cover everything I want to this semester.)


I decided this week to delve into what is actually being done in the world of online finding aids, and of course Michigan's Polar Bear Project is (was?) the benchmark for next generation finding aids. I know I've read one of the Yakel articles before, but I think it was early enough in my iSchool career that I didn't know what EAD was or understand the implementation challenges they faced. The reuse of metadata in this project from EAD, MARC, and a database of the soldiers seems particularly tricky--and useful. I intend to play with EAD more in the coming weeks, and do more research to see if, as it sounds, EAD can be extended as in this project, and will therefore continue to be used. It does seem like so many institutions have so much invested in it that it would really need to prove to be sorely lacking before being discarded altogether.

Meanwhile, the POLARIS project describes what would probably be a lot more feasible for a library like LBJ--because here the finding aids or online, but the collections are not. Several times in the Altman piece he mentions that users wanted and expected--that it was necessary to clarify for them--that the objects themselves be digitized, not just the finding aids. And one the goals for the next stage (as of 2001) is the digitization of the collections, which has not yet been done--unsurprisingly given the size of the collection. For 2009 the Pepper collection is about where most archives are, in my experience. Unlike the Polar Bear Project, the online finding aid is still best used as a tool for research before visiting. It saves time onsite, but the outreach potential--Pepper uses archives-specific terms exclusively and provides few if any images--is very minimal.