American West
"New Frontiers in the Digital Library: Social and Ecological Diversity of the American West" was a multi-year project to create a virtual collection drawing from the resources of major libraries, archives, and museums. The project was funded by a $1 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. A number of reports were created that documented the extensive end user studies that were conducted and the research into a variety of metadata issues, including OAI harvesting, automated topical clustering, and date normalization.
Reports
- Assessment and Usability Issues
- American West Prototype: Comparative Analysis and Heuristic Evaluation [PDF]: A comparative analysis of the prototype against published best practices and findings from a heuristic evaluation of the prototype.
- Calisphere Themed Collection Assessment [PDF]: 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.)
- American West assessment findings [PDF]: Librarians in the Wild: Attitudes and Experiences Concerning Online Exhibit Building. May 2005.
- American West Broad Topic Category Naming Report [PDF]: 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.
- 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[PDF]: User interviews. July 1, 2004
- Harvesting and Metadata Issues
- American West Project Baseline Metadata Requirements [PDF]. February 4, 2005
- American West Project High-level Topic Taxonomy [PDF]. January 14, 2005
- Metadata Enhancement Feasibility Study - Final Report [PDF]. May 23, 2005
- CDL's OAI Harvesting Architecture Development presented by Bill Landis at CDL Technical Solutions [PDF]. June 1, 2005
- American West Topical Clustering Experiments presented by Dave Newman at CDL Technical Solutions [PDF]. June 1, 2005
- Date Normalization Utility [PDF]
