Information Technology (IT) Bond
Encompass Digital Library System
Brief Description of Project:
The expansion of the university library's collections and services into the
digital environment requires new tools for managing digital collections and providing
access to electronic resources. Endeavor Encompass modules work with the library’s
current Endeavor Voyager library system to provide an integrated framework for
organizing, indexing, navigating, linking and delivering electronic resources,
while also serving as a gateway to the library's disparate information systems.
A unified search interface will provide authenticated (LDAP, Kerboros, with hooks
for local schema) access, discovery and retrieval capabilities for digital objects
and full-text resources. The licensing and rights management software, using open
linking system and standards, will leverage the library’s extensive collections
and electronic resources to provide deep access to full-text and data within commercial
databases, standard library and proprietary vendor datasets and the web. Other
tools will allow the library to organize access to external collections and manage,
describe, index and store locally developed digital collections (e.g. Portuguese
Archives, Photograph collections, University papers, etc.) collections be they
image, sound or archival using the appropriate metadata standards whether EAD
(encoded archival description), Dublin Core, or MARC.
Impact on Campus:
The best way to describe the impact is to give an example of how it might
effect researchers. A student could logon from on campus or anywhere in the world,
thereby authorizing access to resources and services. The student could then perform
a unified search across multiple databases, both local and remote, regardless
of format or metadata. The search, for example, could cover all of the library's
Voyager system, a local image database and several commercial databases and bring
the results back to the student’s desktop complete with verified links to
the full text or an image. This search for information could happen in several
ways. One could be a blind 'resource discovery' search, where a student enters
a search not knowing what database to search in and the system brings back results
in ranked order from a wide array of local and remote databases and the web. Another
search by a student or professor who knew exactly where they wanted to search
could be limited to specifically chosen databases and collections. Once results
are retrieved the student/professor would see, for example, that not only did
the system return a citation for a particular article on the topic desired, but
by using open linking technologies, the system embedded a link to the electronic
journal needed or to a full-text of the article previously hidden to them within
another database. Similarly, once retrieving and reading the article (for online
journals following the open linking standards or OpenURL aware), a student would
see further links embedded by the system after references within the article (even
if the article was from another journal/database by a different vendor). Thus
the student could move bi-directionally from article to citation, to reference
and back, with the system managing licensing, access control and copyright behind
the scenes and unknown to the student.
Project Coordinator:
Charlie McNeil, Systems & Digital Services Librarian (cmcneil@umassd.edu)
ITBond ACQUISITIONS (for assessment see section III
C)
