New Frontiers in the Digital Library:
Social and Ecological Diversity of the American West
The American West grant has been completed.
See sections below:
- Goals
- Project Findings
- Deliverables
- Partners Meeting Minutes
- Project Information
- CDL Project Team
- Project Partners: Content Contributors & Tool Implementers
Goals
The California Digital Library has been awarded a three-year William and Flora Hewlett Foundation grant to assemble an American West virtual collection drawing from the resources of major research institutions. This multi-phase project will help scholars, teachers, and librarians implement solutions enabling users to better leverage digital content in an online learning environment. A large virtual collection will be assembled and presented with a range of tools supporting extensive re-configuration, integration with online learning environments, and continued growth through the addition of relevant research and teaching materials produced in the course of its use.
Project Findings
- Project Reports
- 2004-2005: complete progress report submitted to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation October 31, 2005 [PDF]
- 2003-2004 progress report: Outlines the findings from the first year of the American West Project. October 31, 2004 [HTML]
- Assessment and Usability Issues
- American West Prototype: Comparative Analysis and Heuristic Evaluation: A comparative analysis of the prototype against published best practices and findings from a heuristic evaluation of the prototype. [PDF]
- Calisphere Themed Collection Assessment: survey results from K-12 educators who evaluated Calisphere’s themed collections. (Calisphere themed collections were created based on findings from the American West Year 1 and Year 2 assessments.) [PDF]
- American West assessment findings: User interviews. July 1, 2004 [PDF]
- American West assessment findings: User needs assessment of high school social studies teachers and their use of digital objects in teaching practices. January 2005
- American West assessment findings: Librarians in the Wild: Attitudes and Experiences Concerning Online Exhibit Building. May 2005. [PDF]
- American West Broad Topic Category Naming Report: Findings and recommendations from a May 2005 survey, designed to assess the clarity and usefulness of the American West broad topic category divisions and names. May 2005. [PDF]
- Harvesting and Metadata Issues
- OAI Harvesting Infrastructure. November 4, 2004 [HTML]
- American West Project Baseline Metadata Requirements. January 14, 2005 [PDF]
- American West Project High-level Topic Taxonomy. February 4, 2005 [PDF]
- Metadata Enhancement Feasibility Study - Final Report. May 23, 2005 [PDF]
- CDL's OAI Harvesting Architecture Development presented by Bill Landis at CDL Technical Solutions. June 1, 2005 [PDF]
- American West Topical Clustering Experiments presented by Dave Newman at CDL Technical Solutions. June 1, 2005 [PDF]
Deliverables
- Assemble an integrated virtual collection drawn from diverse content contributed by multiple institutions. Collection will be built upon existing CDL built content from eScholarship and the Online Archive of California, content harvested from partners and crawled from relevant web sites, as well as content from licensed sources.
- Based upon needs discovered during user assessment workshops, develop tools to configure and integrate virtual collections with local personalized content. User audience includes UC and community college faculty, academic librarians, K-12 teachers, and public librarians.
- Develop capacity to deliver learning objects based on American West assets to learning platforms such as WebCT, BlackBoard, etc.
- Develop capacities to manage learning objects that can be re-used in the context of "learning."
- Create a portal for the UC community that employs the integration and configuration tools developed during the project.
- Recommend tools that target audiences, specifically K-12, community college, and public librarians, could use to configure virtual collections.
- Report on the what different constituencies desire from Internet resources.
Partners Meeting Minutes
- November 17, 2003 [PDF]
- April 18, 2004 [PDF]
- October 24, 2004 [PDF]
- Conference call: February 4, 2005 [PDF]
- Conference call: April 1, 2005 [PDF]
- April 12, 2005 [PDF]
- American West Project Status Report [PDF]
- CDL's OAI Harvesting Architecture Development [PDF]
- CDL OAI Harvest Architecture Overview (Diagram) [PDF]
- American West Topical Clustering Experiments [PDF]
- Metadata Enhancement Feasibility Study - Final Report [PDF]
- American West User Experience Design: Report on Progress to Date [PDF]
- American West Personas
- Conference call: June 14, 2005 [PDF]
- November 6, 2005
Project Information
- Partners listserv: Describes how America West project partners can post messages and unsubscribe to the listerv. [HTML]
- Project proposal: August 15, 2003 [PDF]
- Fact sheet: Spring 2004 [PDF]
CDL Project Team
Peter Brantley, Director, Technology
Robin Chandler, Director, Built Content
Laine Farley, Director, Digital Library Services
David Greenbaum, Director, Interactive University
Dan Greenstein, Principal Investigator
Rosalie Lack, User Assessment
Bill Landis, Metadata Coordinator
Mike McKenna, Technical Lead
Roy Tennant, Project Manager, Metasearch Infrastructure
Steve Toub, Web Design Manager
Project Partners: Content Contributors & Tool Implementers
California Digital Library
Colorado Digitization Project
Harvard University Libraries
Indiana University Library
Interactive University, University of California Berkeley
Library of Congress, American Memory
University of California Libraries
UCLA Consortium on Instructional Technology
University of Michigan Libraries
University of Virginia Library
University of Washington Libraries
- Need assistance? Contact us via e-mail: oacops @ cdlib . org