Research - IMLS Digital Collections and Content - IMLS Digital Collections and Content

As efforts to integrate and federate digital resources proceed apace, we are learning more about the problems that emerge at different levels of scale and granularity. Building on prior work of the Digital Collections and Content project (DCC), we will investigate and implement a systematic approach that confronts these problems and offers robust means for adding value and improving access to existing digital aggregations. Based on over four years of development and research experience, we have identified new core initiatives that can substantially upgrade the quality of the IMLS digital collection registry and metadata repository for users and advance the current base of knowledge and practice in the federation of digital collections. Our previous work has positioned us to move into a more highly informed level of development and theoretical work as we continue to test and ground advances in the engineering pragmatics of building, learning, and documenting.

How can the existing IMLS DCC be expanded and enhanced to be more useful to scholarly users?

What approaches can be specified to assist the community of digital resource developers to consistently work toward more useful large-scale federated digital collections?

The work will be aimed at five objectives that we believe are essential, interrelated steps in answering these questions. The first objective provides the foundation for the four new core initiatives that follow:

Maintain the IMLS DCC as a resource and testbed to benefit users and researchers of digital content.

Articulate content evaluation and development guidelines specifically designed for strategic, usefocused federation. Conduct a formal evaluation of the IMLS DCC content and based on the outcomes, expand the collection for targeted scholarly communities.

Analyze relationships between collection-level metadata and item-level metadata to better preserve context and enhance functionality for scholarly communities.

Experiment with and test metasearch capabilities with primary and secondary sources, exploiting findings from metadata relationships identified above.

Improve interface representation of content and context for scholarly use.

See our 2007 grant proposal for more information on our research.