New Energy, New Horizons

Aquifer core team members barely took a breather after a good showing for American Social History Online at DLF Fall Forum in Philadelphia. Look for our presentations, Realizing Benefits for Scholars and the Digital Library Community through DLF Aquifer to be linked from the web version of the conference schedule soon after Thanksgiving.

Everyone seems eager to get on to the next thing, getting the SRU components in place for the Sakai and federated search integrations, working on facets, fixing bugs, adding collections, integrating asset actions more tightly, planning the assessment activities, getting the word out. If you have collections to contribute, please let us know!

We are particularly cognizant that Chick's tenure with us ends in March 2009 so we want to be sure the architecture is well established and documented by then. Based on some discussions with Erik Hatcher at the Ruby Conference he attended pre-forum, Chick plans some re-engineering tweaks before getting back to facets--but I'll let him fill in the detail on that work.

As we continue development, we also continue to look for and cultivate relationships with other projects and organizations in an effort to leverage what we are doing for scholars and in the digital library community. Our commitment to collaboration and to generating useful services has inoculated us against "not invented here" syndrome. In addition to the collection registry integration mentioned in an earlier post, the MIT Simile Timeline and a date normalization tool from the California Digital Library have also been incorporated in the portal. This adaptive re-use mixed in with terrific energy, teamwork and focus is what moves us along.