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Re: Common portal for Archives information



Terry Abraham wrote:

> 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.

Interesting discussion on portals for access to archival collections, but we seem to assume a lot about how end users will want/attempt to use these portals. Pulling up all the "John Smith collection inventories" assumes that an end user knows they want the John Smith collection, an assumption that most research on end users of online information systems thus far doesn't seem to support! It also assumes that all of us somehow encode the name of the collection in some similar way, which seems a highly questionable assumption as well.

Terry's idea about using existing bibliographic records is one way that a portal might work, though it seems like it would privilege C&U archives/MSS repository collections, since these have generally been the majority of OCLC/RLIN contributors. Moving towards some sort of community data content standard for these online "inventories," and especially towards some agreement on inclusion of Dublin-Core-mapped metadata for creator, title, and from an end user perspective most importantly--**subjects**, in our online inventories regardless of whether they are encoded in EAD, HTML, or some other encoding scheme, might be another.  That way we, as a community of professionals, would give these web crawling spiders some intelligent data to work with, which would go a long way towards making a generic archival portal feasible!

--
| Bill Landis
| Manuscripts Librarian, Special Collections and Archives
| The UCI Libraries, University of California
| P.O. Box 19557, Irvine, CA 92623-9557
| 949 824.3113 Voice | 949 824.2472 Fax
| blandis@uci.edu

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