| Carole Ann Fabian Director of Strategic Outreach and Users Services ARTstor |
Dale Flecker Associate Director for Planning and Systems Harvard University |
| William W. Ying Chief Technology Officer ARTstor |
The availability of simple-search interfaces such as Google, has added urgency to fulfill user expectations for seamless access across large libraries of digital content regardless of source, local or proprietary. While intellectual property constraints continue to challenge content providers’ efforts to provide this ease of access, several strategies are being explored to optimize access across collections. Many organizations are seeking solutions for accessing local and proprietary content through a single search and discovery interface. Harvard’s VIA initiative seeks to bring together diverse image resources from across the campus with a unified data schema and repository. ARTstor and others are exploring a number of strategies to facilitate user access to a broad range of content – both local resources and those assets that are served by remote providers. One collaboration that seeks to tie together these resources in a dynamic way is the ARTstor Harvard VIA Hosting Pilot whereby 140,000 digital images from the Harvard University VIA collection are made available to Harvard constituents through the ARTstor Institutional Collections Pilot Program. This session will describe the project, its challenges, technical processes for data and asset exchange and demonstrate the integration of Harvard and ARTstor content in a single search result. Ongoing development between ARTstor and Harvard is exploring dynamic data exchange of assets and metadata using OAI harvesting protocols.
Handout (MS Word)