If before October of 2008 you knew next to nothing about the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Willa Cather collection, your lack of knowledge might be forgiven. Reference to that collection—over 200,000 items, including print, archival, and electronic media—was scattered across four different data platforms. Although having a special search of these collections has its place at UNL, all of its Cather holdings are routinely revealed in a simple Encore search. What’s more, logged-in UNL users can add tags to the harvested records, leveraging the knowledge of the research community and allowing more specialized searchers to refine results based on the user-contributed tags.
It’s fascinating to see how print, archival, and electronic resources fold together in Encore. Our materials are spread across four data platforms but are brought together in a single Encore search.
Dee Ann Allison
Professor and Director of Computing
Operations and Research Services
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
See for yourself
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln library staff continues to harvest new collections into Encore, including their Digital Commons™ institutional repository of faculty-created research, images from art and architecture courses, the Lewis and Clark Journals, and the Walt Whitman Archive. UNL is a Harvester trailblazer. Other harvesting projects are in the works. Stay tuned or check out their Encore implementation first hand.