The Value Proposition

The current round of conversations I am having with Aquifer participant library directors is allowing me to perfect my Aquifer "elevator speech", as Paul Courant at Michigan calls it. As we develop American Social History Online, we are also planning for Aquifer's future. Where we head with Aquifer depends largely on the value Aquifer adds.

Value for participant libraries and cultural heritage organizations

We fully expect to add value for collection contributors with our strategies for exposing collection metadata to commercial search services, making digital collections more visible and driving traffic to library websites. Aquifer pays attention to page rank so individual contributors don't have to. Aquifer boosts cultural heritage organizations' return on investment by promoting quality collections that remain tucked away in the far corners of the web.

Value for scholars

Assessment activities for American Social History Online will tell the story. Did scholars know these collections existed? Are they useful? Are they useful in aggregate? Is a themed collection useful? Is it useful to link from citation management software that suggests how primary digital material should be cited--a problem logged in The Impact of Digital Resources on Humanities Research study done at Rice University? What other material needs to be included to make Aquifer a useful set of collections and services?

Assessment begins next week with rapid prototyping feedback from scholars and will continue throughout the course of the project. Our goal: to develop Aquifer into a suite of resources and tools that every Americanist scholar needs.