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Re: Common portal for Archives information



How about this solution? Develop a search engine (or a search strategy for
Google or some other search engine) that will pull up all the John Smith
collection inventories upon request. It should also deal with the non
English inventories scattered around the world (some of which are in
non-Roman characters). That way we let the wonders of automation and web
crawling spiders do the work for us.

One other possibility is to look to the existing bibliographic databases.
I know we have manuscript collections reported to our catalog (and through
it to OCLC, with some in RLIN) that are not large enough to have
inventories. But they might be of interest to some researchers out there.
Web front ends to catalogs increasingly allow click-through linkage from
the bibliographic record to the inventory if that is available.

    ---Terry

-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-
Terry Abraham   Special Collections, University of Idaho
<http://www.lib.uidaho.edu/special-collections/>


On Tue, 6 Mar 2001, Michael Pullin wrote:

> I have had suggestions to look at a couple of sites that are doing
> some of what I had mentioned in my previous post.  I checked those
> sites and the major part of the project I had suggested is missing
> (or at least I didn't see it).  I proposed a common "database" of
> information about all of the collections so that you would have
> one place to search to find where a particular collection is located.
> On one of the sites suggested for my viewing there is a search
> function, but it only searches the locations that are referenced
> not the collections at that location.  For example, if I wanted the
> John Smith collection and it happened to be at State University,
> I could search for John Smith and find nothing, but I could search
> for State University and that would come up.  That type of search
> doesn't help you find a particular collection; it only allows you
> to find places that have collections.
>
> Of course, the portal I proposed would only be helpful if MANY sites
> participated.  I had two responses that were favorable toward the
> project.  Are there any others?  Maybe we could just ask the
> existing portal sites to add search capabilities of all the collections
> available from the sites they reference (that would require the
> cooperation of those sites).
>
> What do you think?
>
> *******************************************************************************
> Michael Pullin                                    E-mail: mpullin@lib.swbts.edu
> Archivist and Special Collections Librarian         Tel (817) 923-1921 Ext 3338
> Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary                    Fax (817) 921-8765
> PO Box 22000
> Fort Worth, TX  76122-0490
>
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A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

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                    *or*:  UNSUB ARCHIVES
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Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html

Problems?  Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <rschmidt@lib.muohio.edu>