Expanding the pool, installing new faucets

Lately, my use of water metaphors to describe Aquifer progress has been judicious, but I can no longer resist. We are on the cusp of adding significant additional resources to the pool from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Columbia University, Harvard University and the California Digital Library. At the same time, the Sakai and federated search "outlets" are under development.



Watch the American Social History Online website regularly for new content and new features. Be sure to try the enhancements to search that allow search results to be re-sorted and that enable search results to be broken down by subject, topic, place, name, genre, decade, year, collection, language or media type. This is functionality our early testers said they would like to see. Let us know what you think.



We were excited to learn that Colin Koteles, a student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UIUC is doing a thesis on Existing Conformance to DLF/Aquifer MODS Implementation Guidelines. His analysis will be useful in many ways, including setting expectations for legacy collection readiness for Aquifer aggregation and areas to focus on in training development for metadata creation for shared collections.



Leveraging effort through collaboration continues to be the Aquifer MO. Collaboration among participants of course but also collaboration with complementary initiatives. The technology working group continues to monitor OAI/ORE work, looking for points of intersection and is pursuing ways to improve the way American Social History Online works with Zotero.

Much to look forward to in 2008.