The MetaArchive Project (2001-2003) was an experiment in facilitating the research of scholars. Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Library, in collaboration with partnering libraries and archives, created a Metadata harvesting and searching service that offers multiple institutions a combination of new technologies for sharing information about locally maintained resources of interest to scholars, as well as a means of seeking and discovering complementary information held by other institutions. This service aggregates metadata (information about scholarly information) from contributing institutions, and provides a publicly searchable web interface to this metadata aggregation.
- Complete MetaArchive Final Report (PDF)
- Excerpts from Project Proposal to Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (PDF)
The AmericanSouth Project (2004-2005) is a collaborative endeavor to improve access to scholarly resources concerning Southern history and culture. AmericanSouth seeks to make crucial material for the understanding of the Southern experience accessible to all citizens through the creation of a collaborative digital collection of Southern history and culture. In this project, Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Library, in collaboration with a group of major research libraries in the Southeast, set up a central metadata server to function as a portal to selected scholarly resources at cooperating institution. Scholars provide intelllectual organization for AmericanSouth.org, designing an interactive structure to promote and facilitate research, teaching, and communications.
The MetaCombine Project (2003-2005) will practically experiment with improved techniques for organization and access to scholarly information via the Open Archives Initiative for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) as well as the World Wide Web. Through this project, Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Library will explore combinations of information and services at various levels of abstraction: combined search of OAI and Web resources, combined semantic clusters of information, and combined digital library components acting as a whole.
Music of Social Change (2003-2005), an initiative of Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Library, in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the Atlanta History Center, and the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, will use the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol to devleop a new model for library-museum collaborations that broaden access to resources for learning communities.
Proceedings from the Workshop on Applications of Metadata Harvesting in Scholarly Portals (Emory University, October 2003)
Findings from the MetaScholar Projects: AmericanSouth and MetaArchive.
This event marked the conclusion of two projects funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to advance the understanding of metadata harvesting and scholarly communication. These projects were conjoined in 2001 to form the MetaScholar Initiative, an ongoing research collaboration based at Emory University involving librarians, scholars, archivists, curators, and technologists. Now concluding, these projects have successfully led to many findings that have informed the planning for new endeavors that the MetaScholar Initiative is now undertaking.
Our goals in organizing this workshop had been: to include presentations of research findings by participants in the projects; to provide a forum for scholars involved in the projects to discuss development of the portals for scholarly communication and research; to discuss future development of the resulting portal systems; to introduce new MetaScholar Projects now underway; and to examine the value of the OAI and other open source systems in the academic community.
papers included in proceedings:
| Findings from the MetaArchive and AmericanSouth Projects on the Application of Metadata Harvesting to Scholarly Portals | (M. Halbert) |
| A Scholar’s Perspective on AmericanSouth.Org | (C. Wilson) |
| Group Think in a World of Individuals: OAI, Metadata, and Sharing Cultural Resources | (S. McAlister) |
| Thoughts on Metadata Crosswalks and Harvesting | (S. Pinckard) |
| MetaArchive: A Model for Facilitating Dissemination of Metadata from Small Archives | (K. Stallard) |
| Adding OAI Provider Capabilities to Digital Archives, Perspectives from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville | (A. Smith and C. Hodge) |
| ARC: An Open Source Metadata Harvesting System | (K. Maly) |
| Auburn Findings from the MetaScholar Projects: AmericanSouth and MetaArchive | (S. Downer) |
| The Music of Social Change: Using OAI-PMH in the Creation of a Digital Memory Site | (K. Skinner) |
| Digital Media and New Forms of Scholarship | (L. MacKethan) |
| In the Halo of the Moon: Significance of AmericanSouth.Org for Research | (E. Kesse) |
read proceedings in their entirety (PDF)