Encore » Encore Harvesting Services

OAI-PMH Harvesting at St. Lawrence University Library (NY)

Spenser Thompson — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:44:49 +0000

Back to The Land, Back to the Library

Encore is a modern tool for easy discovery of anything your library wants to offer, and, by extension, it is an easy way to promote aspects of the collections that are truly local. An particularly “earthy” example is St. Lawrence University Library’s (NY) pilot project to build, digitize and then harvest a special collection into Encore called Back to the Land Movement in St. Lawrence County (1960-Present). The Dublin Core metadata that will be harvested is an ideal format for easy discovery by users and deployment into a variety of contexts such as OAIster and Innovative’s Encore discovery platform.

Starting four decades ago, St. Lawrence County was one of dozens of rural destinations in the US to attract the attention of “back-to-the-landers,” a broad movement of mostly young people seeking anti-materialistic lifestyles in rural settings. The back-to-the-landers established communes and individual homesteads, experimented with alternatives to the cash economy, and tried to sustain themselves through farming and other land-based ventures. Over the years, they also became engaged citizens of the county, greatly influencing public life in the region.

Three key components of the digital archival project are to search the published record for citations; conduct fieldwork in St. Lawrence County; and invite those associated with the back-to-the-land community to submit copies of their own photographs, journals, and newsletters for inclusion into the collection. The collection will consist of 3,000-4,000 items such as journals, books, newsletters, ephemera, recorded interviews, and photographs created by back-to-the-landers in the county and by those who have documented this movement.

Says Bart Harloe, University Librarian: “Despite the great significance of back-to-the-landers to the history and culture of St. Lawrence County, no systematic effort has ever been made to assemble a research collection on the subject. The partners in this project aim to amass as complete a record of this population as possible.”

The collection is just one of three harvesting projects that also include the Dwight P. Church Photography Collection and Nsukka Artists and Contemporary Nigerian Art Collection. The latter fits perfectly with the curricula offered through St. Lawrence University’s African Studies program and Kenya Study Abroad program. Each entails bringing OAI-compliant metadata into the Encore catalog, side by side with e-journals and book titles.

Harloe continues: “An Encore search will provide a very good picture of what kinds of resources are available, their history and strengths, and a one-step search for articles across the various disciplines. The addition of these three collections, including Back to the Land, is going to blend in as a bellwether of our contribution to the campus and integral to teaching and research.”

Encore quite simply offers up the best from the world of information, plus the ability to bring local collections in the mix that bring folks back to the library, literally and figuratively. In the case of St. Lawrence University…Back to the Land and back to the library!

Find out more about Encore Harvesting Services.

St. Lawrence University Selects Encore Harvesting Services

Spenser Thompson — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:18:21 +0000

St. Lawrence University (NY) utilized Encore Harvesting Services to produce a single unified search of its OAI-PMH-compliant collections. The first collection is an institutional repository of seven regional liberal arts schools, called LASR (Liberal Arts Scholarly Repository), described in Qualified Dublin Core(SM) on a DSpace™ platform; the second is an image and video database of the University’s art gallery, described in Qualified Dublin Core(SM) and/or VRA Core on a CONTENTdm® platform.

“We want to use Encore to make these unique, local collections available through a single search just like any other collection we make available, such as our books and e-journals,” says Bart Harloe, University Librarian. “We were looking for a different search experience that is not linear but dynamic, like Google. Encore gets us there.”

Harloe continues: “The institutional repository collection brings unique research from our campus to a main point of search. With the art gallery content, we are trying to make visual resources more prominent in our community. Putting images in the Encore environment also makes the experience more dynamic and more visually stimulating. We will even include art produced by our students. In the future, we will extend the Harvesting Services project to include local, archival material.”

Why Innovative? Says Harloe: “We’ve had a productive, long-term relationship with Innovative. Providing a more internet-like search experience of our library is the next logical step.”

CONTENTdm® is a registered trademark of OCLC, Inc.
DSpace™ is a trademark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dublin Core(SM) is a service mark of OCLC, Inc.

Tear Down Barriers—Easily Integrate OAI-Compliant Collections

Andrea Silvestri — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:51:47 +0000

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.