I have been communicating with many of you individually over the last few
months, but not giving any group updates. Here is a brief outline of where
we are in the project.
Berkeley, Stanford, Penn State, and NYPL have all completed copies of
project database and submitted them to Berkeley. I have been able to
successfully generate MOA2 objects from all of these databases with the
exception of Stanford; the only reason I have not generated MOA2 objects
from Stanford is that the database is "hot off the electronic press," as
Steve put it. The one problem that several institutions have had is in
placing the derivative image files in a place where the tool can find them
via http (i.e. through a web browser). Rick has done some great work on
the MOA2 applet-based tool, and is working on a servlet version. If you
haven't done so, check out the tool and let us know what you think
(available from the project web page). Although at the moment, only
Berkeley objects are available, we are ready to load some of the Penn State
objects which have had the image issues straightened out (thanks Sue!). So
in the new year, you can look forward to viewing the servlet version of the
tool, and also images from your own institutions.
The MOA2 White Paper has finally grown up to become a publication at CLIR
and should be available in the New Year. As I understand it, it is out
now, although I haven't seen a copy. Thank you all very much for your
thoughtful review and comments.
Thanks also to those of you who suffered with and critiqued the project
database. Although we were pleased to be able to develop a project
database in a very short timeframe, we were also aware of its shortcomings.
Thanks in large part to this project, we have been able to develop a new
database, the Digital Library Project Control database, which has a lot of
great added functionality, and more importantly, room for descriptive
metadata.
So what's left? Quite a lot, actually. We need to get the finding aids
for the collections up on our web server; we need to start the evaluation
process, and I will send more information about that very soon; and we need
to do all the million other things large and small to bring the grant to a
close.
Thanks for bearing with us through thick and thin, and continuing to work
on the project. Here's wishing all of you wonderful holidays and a happy
New Year!
Merrilee