Orbis Cascade Alliance Receives IMLS National Leadership Grant to Develop Cross-Search and Context Utility

The Northwest Digital Archives program of the Orbis Cascade Alliance has received a $249,904 National Leadership Grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to build, evaluate, and demonstrate the long-term viability of the Cross-Search and Context Utility (XCU). The XCU, prototyped with an IMLS Collaborative Planning Grant in 2009, will bring together digitized content from thirty-six systems at twenty-five institutions and detailed EAD finding aid metadata from archival and manuscript collections at thirty-three institutions. The result will be access to digitized objects in the context of the collections to which they belong, greatly improving the presentation and usability of digital content and associated metadata and better meeting the needs users.

Betsy Wilson, Chair of the Alliance’s Board of Directors, states, “We are excited to receive this grant from IMLS and believe that the Cross-Search and Context Utility promises to be a major step forward in helping researchers find and interpret the amazing breadth and depth of unique materials in Northwest collections.”

“This will change the game for our membership, which has many different repositories of digital content—historic photographs, documents, audio and video recordings—that don’t often ‘talk’ to each other,” says NWDA Program Manager Jodi Allison-Bunnell. “This project will not just bring that content together, but will do so in a way that makes sense for the researchers that our member institutions serve.”

“Receipt of this highly competitive grant is excellent news.” Says Trevor Bond, Head of Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections at Washington State University Libraries.

The XCU concept stems from three years of needs assessment and planning for digital services conducted by NWDA and Orbis Cascade Alliance member libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies. While great advances are being made in the discoverability of widely replicated content, unique materials remain difficult to find and none of the existing or emerging discovery systems successfully convey the connections between related digital objects. User studies demonstrate that the ways that unique materials held by cultural heritage organizations are currently presented in the online environment are confusing to users because of a lack of sufficient context and metadata. Through the further development and implementation of the XCU, this project will address both the aggregation of content and the integration of results to better represent the intellectual and/or physical collections of materials offline. If successful, the XCU will be a valuable proof of concept for cultural heritage organizations that have digitized content and EAD metadata about unique collections in disparate systems but lack the means for searching and presenting material these objects in context.

Partner institutions in this effort with the University of Oregon (as grant fiscal agent) and the Orbis Cascade Alliance are Lewis & Clark College, Oregon State University, University of Oregon Libraries, Pacific University, Seattle Municipal Archives, Western Washington University, Washington State University, and the University of Montana.

The Orbis Cascade Alliance is a consortium of 36 academic libraries in Oregon and Washington. Alliance member libraries work together to provide outstanding services to students and faculty, share information resources and expertise, develop library staff, and help members allocate financial and human resources to serve the unique needs of each member. To this end, the Alliance considers the combined collections of member institutions as one collection. The Alliance supports a number of services that support this vision, including Summit, a system that allows students, faculty and staff to easily search and request library materials owned by member libraries; courier service offering delivery of library materials in Oregon, Washington and Idaho; the Northwest Digital Archives, which offers enhanced access to primary sources in the Northwest U.S.; cooperative purchasing for databases, ebooks and ejournals; and other digital library services.

Spanish Revolution, data curation

These days, while Spanish Revolution is happening on the most importants cities of Spain, I wonder if information produced by these people is being kept. The importance and relevance of this information is important for future researchers. Communications, technology, social movements and of course political are part of this revolution.
Is information going to be important for historians? For politicians?

I personally think that this information is important for everybody, but I do not have the perception that this information is going to be kept well saved since just in Madrid are people employing its time to this task. Let's see in the future whether this information is useful or useless.

Digital Curation vs Digital Preservation video

Interesante video de Carl Lee de la Univ. de Chapel Hill, sobre la conservación digital y los riesgos de no planificar correctamente la preservación digital.

INFORSALUD 2011

Se celebra los dias 22, 23, 24 de febrero el INFORSALUD 2011 en Madrid
Lás areas temáticas que cubre son


1. Innovación de Procesos Asistenciales
2. Innovación en Servicios a la Ciudadanía
3. Innovación en Organización y Gestión Sanitaria
4. Sistemas de Información Sanitarios
5. Sistemas de soporte a la gestión
6. Sistemas de Imágenes médicas y su integración. PACs
7. Historia de Salud Electrónica
8. Receta electrónica
9. Telemedicina
10. Bioinformática
11. Utilización de las WEB en salud
12. Estándares y su aplicación práctica en la información sanitaria
13. Experiencia de implantación práctica, migración y convivencia de sistemas
14. Organización de la gestión y operación de las TIC en las organizaciones Sanitarias
15. Aplicaciones de las TIC en Salud Pública
16. Aplicaciones para formación y entrenamiento e-Learning para salud
17. Los SI Soporte a la toma de decisiones, y gestión del conocimiento
18. Automatización y mejora de procesos para la investigación
19. Acceso Electrónica de los ciudadanos a los Servicios de Salud
21. Impacto de la LEY 11/2007 (LAECSP), en el entorno sanitario
22. Seguridad de pacientes
23. Coorperación Sanidad Pública-Sanidad Privada
24. Libre elección de médico
20. Sistemas de Información Sociosanitarios

e-books reader

Hace un tiempo que por una razón u otra he dejado de escribir. En la entrada que os propongo hayn un tema que me llama la atención. Son los lectores e-books. Recientemente adquirí uno y francamente estoy contento con él. Pero hay ciertas cuestiones que me planteo:

¿Es posible adaptar estas pantallas con tinta electrónica a nuestras pantallas habituales?

El principal argumento de venta de los fabricantes es que la tinta electrónica no cansa la vista. Es cierto, leo muchos documentos al cabo de una semana y con este artilugio la vista no se cansa.

El único inconviente que le veo es la lectura global que hacemos en papel, no es aplicable a estos lectores. Y formas de leer...no hay muchas.

Se me ocurren un motón de aplicacions donde esto podria tener mucho sentido:
-Personas mayores que usan ordenadores
-Programadores que se pasan todo el dia programando
-Estudiantes de cualquier nivel especialmente los que ahora empezaran a emplear...libros electrónicos por ordenador.

-....



Está claro bajo mi punto de vista que es la dirección correcta. Si este tipo de dispositivo no cansa, pensando que es blanco y negro, seria interesante tener pantallas con tinta electrónica en color y en blanco y negro. De esta forma el usuario podria elegir el tipo de tinta que quiera utilizar.


Las personas que nos estamos un montón de horas de nuestra vida frente a una pantalla, creo que lo agradecerían.

¿Es tecnológicamente tan complicado?