Anne Bridges
Associate Professor
University of Tennessee
Mark Baggett
Assistant Professor
University of Tennessee
Ken Wise
Associate Professor
University of Tennessee
The Database of the Smokies (DOTS) is an open access database developed by a team of subject specialists, systems librarians, and information science students at the University of Tennessee Libraries. The database, constructed on the open-source Drupal platform, is designed as a successor to the scholarly print monograph and to capitalize on the wealth of both digital and traditional content specific to the Great Smoky Mountains region from 1935 to the present. It is a complement to “Terra Incognita: An Annotated Bibliography of the Great Smoky Mountains, 1544–1934,” due to be published by the University of Tennessee Press later this year.
DOTS includes citations to published items, digital photographs, websites, and manuscripts with links to scanned surrogates (where copyright permits). The database is an outgrowth of the Great Smoky Mountains Regional Project, a fifteen-year effort by the University of Tennessee Libraries to promote research and collections about the Smokies region. As well as providing access to written material, it will also provide links to the thousands of images that form a part of the University of Tennessee’s digital collections of Smokies photographs. Value resides in access to the rare, obscure, and difficult-to-locate Smoky Mountain material and in the comprehensiveness of the database content. Comprehensiveness is reinforced by the DOTS project’s implementation of a “crowd-sourcing” mechanism as a means for gleaning content from an established clientele of sophisticated users accessing the bibliography as a research tool. Crowd-sourcing assimilates the knowledge and expertise of a diversity of users and thereby generates an independent outside prestige for the database itself.
This presentation will focus on the model of database creation that allows a library to leverage subject and technology expertise along with student labor to create a product useful to both a general and specialized clientele.