2003-2004 Progress Report

See the complete progress report submitted to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation: [PDF]

Significant achievements in the first year include:

• Building partnership among contributing libraries.
• Completing initial user needs assessments for the design and construction of the American West collection and associated tool suites.
• Developing use cases that guide key investment decisions with regard to collection content, service functionality, and the provision of appropriate tool suites.
• Planning the collection.
• Creating functional and technical specifications for essential tool suites.

Highlights from the report:

• Curated collections: A user needs assessment found that curated collections are enormously valuable, that well-defined collection boundaries matter, and that annotation is important.
• Use cases: Three use cases for the American West collection were developed based on the user needs assessment. The first use case describes how the American West collection can be used as a reference collection, the second describes the collection as an interactive and creative experience, and the third describes how the project's tools can be used.
• Collection review: A collection review identified key strengths of the collection content and areas where gaps could be filled.
• Collection building strategies: Strategies were developed to fill essential gaps in five key areas: American literature, American music, American maps, American art and architecture, and natural history.
• Challenges of subsetting: A review of the collection content on offer from the partner libraries surfaced two challenges: libraries organize their materials to meet local needs, and data providers describe their collections differently.
• Functional specifications for tools: Specifications for tools were developed in the following areas: basic infrastructure tools, collection building tools, curatorial tools, access tools, and customization tools.