Flora and Fauna of the Great Lakes Region:
Collaborators University Library - - Major investment in digital library content, infrastructure and architecture
Museum of Zoology and Herbarium - Strong collections; increasing pressure to serve a wider audience especially via the Web
Exhibits Museum of Natural History
Project Goals To develop increased access to the Great Lakes region portions of the Museums collections To develop an extensible infrastructure for putting natural history collections online To explore, prototype and test tools for using the online resources for a variety of scholarly and educational purposes
Museum Goals Additional support for digitizing collections Opening their collections to new audiences Opportunity to explore partnership with the Library - Support for maintenance and long-term access to their data
(screen shot)
Library Goals Extend digital library support from the humanities to the natural sciences Test the ability of the existing architecture to support new subjects and methods of inquiry Extend digital library architecture to include cross-class searching - text, image, collection database records
Digital Library Holdings at the University of Michigan Holdings as of March 2001 - Full electronic text 31,558
- Pages/images 6,684,342
- Bibliographic Records 57,081,109
- Words 2,536,312,477
- Bytes 190,629,303,672
Digital Library Architecture at the University of Michigan Image class - Federation of diverse collection databases
- Support for image retrieval
Text class Other classes such as bibliographic data and archival finding aids Middleware is Open Source (DLXS)
New Challenge - Cross-Class Searching To facilitate searching across text, image, and collection database records To return results to users in ways that will be useful to them, rather than simply reflecting the characteristics of the underlying systems
New Content Supplementing the museum collection databases with: - Field notes
- Surrogate records and page images
- Images
- New photography and digitization of existing slides and negatives
- Major monographs
New Audiences Non-specialist users - Lifelong learners
- Undergraduate students
- K-12 users
Specialist users working in areas such as biodiversity research - working outside the confines of a single discipline
Metadata Challenges Federate data from multiple existing databases Create metadata for new materials Provide basis for coherent shared displays of search results
Collections Databases—Federation
Mammals Example
Augmenting Existing Content Common Names Geospatial Referencing Dates
Collections Databases—Federation
Collections Databases—Augmentation
New Databases Field Notes Image Metadata
Field Notes Structure—Collection Event
Field Notes Structure—Species Account
New Processes Matching field content to authoritative forms for lookup construction (A miracle happens here) Lookup export to originating databases (if time and funds permit)
(what do art and fungi have in common?)
Dual Model of Image Representation VRA Representation Model Work=physical entity that exists, has existed at some time in the past, or that could exist in the future (fish, field notes page, painting, etc) Image=a visual representation of a work
One work may have multiple image representations (picture of whole frog, frog parts, x-rays, etc.) Images may have sequential derivations (photo is digitized, digital file has thumbnail, etc.)
Separating Work Data from Image Data
Why? Work only needs to be described once Image history is documented Each image is associated with data (like creation dates) that are specific to its existence
Storing data in the Digital Library Image database relates work and image metadata Metadata exported as records with 1:1 correspondence with image file names Digital Library stores metadata and image files using standard image class model core categories User search calls up metadata and linked images
Desired result Users can search across classes and collections using core fields (species, common name, location, date) or keywords Users can search within collections using fields chosen from originating database Displays can be customized to show common or custom field labels.
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