Goings on with core team and working groups

As Chick mentioned in his Chicks Bit Brick Headings post on Saturday, Citrus Studios will design the user interface for the Aquifer portal. Citrus has a great track record in the cultural heritage arena. Their CEO, Kalika Yap worked at the Getty before starting her own firm. Citrus continues to do work for the Getty such as the award-winning Mexico: From Empire to Revolution website. They did the Archival Research Center website for the University of Southern California and are working on a user interface design for the Parker on the web collaboration between Corpus Christi College and Stanford University. Bringing in a team of professionals seemed like a better bet than trying to find a developer with UI and design expertise. Citrus has formed their team and will be in touch with their project plan this week.

Chick has released his pre-alpha portal for the core team to test. The next couple of weeks will be busy with continued development and eventual move to a more powerful server. Scholars will get their first look at a very early version of the portal at the end of August, although the Citrus UI will not be ready for integration until October. Mix in strategy for exposing collections in the portal to crawling by commercial search services and asset action integration and we are looking at a very active couple of months.

The services working group list carried a lively discussion about possible tools for scholar evaluators to use as they assess the American Social History Online collections for content and ease of use. Prompted by DLF Executive Director Peter Brantley's recent post, Working in Facebook on O'Reilly Radar the discussion explored marketing and assessment and concluded with an observation that we will likely use multiple tools and will settle on which ones to employ when we have the portal (and later, the local implementations) ready to show beyond the internal team.

Bill Landis at Yale has started working with the metadata working group to get an EAD to Aquifer MODS crosswalk developed. Having such a crosswalk available really will enable hidden cultural heritage collections to be brought to light through Aquifer. We have a slow, steady movement to add collections with the expectation that we will add at least four new content providers in the next couple of months.