DLF Aquifer Receives Mellon Grant
to Make Scholarly Collections Interoperable
Washington, D.C.The Digital Library Federation (DLF) has received an
$816,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a project
designed to make distributed digital collections easier for scholars to
use. The project, DLF Aquifer Development for Interoperability Across
Scholarly Repositories: American Social History Online, will
implement schemas, data models, and technologies to enable scholars to
use digital collections as one in a variety of local environments.
DLF Board President Carol A. Mandel said, "This project exemplifies
the goals of the Digital Library Federation to support the work of
scholars through rich, federated, and enduring digital library
collections and is integral to our expectations for Aquifer. We are
grateful to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for helping DLF realize its
aspirations."
"DLF is delighted to obtain the support of the Mellon Foundation to
pursue the development of applications that help people knit together the
information and content they seek for their scholarship and
learning," said DLF Executive Director Peter Brantley. "The
Aquifer project will deliver the collaborative experience that libraries
need as we start to realize new ways of providing services to our
communities," he added.
"The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s support for Aquifer is
gratifying," said DLF Aquifer Director Katherine Kott. "Aquifer
participant libraries are building systems that will enable libraries to
deliver important resources to scholars where they do their
work."
The project will address the difficulty that humanities and social
science scholars face in finding and using digital materials located in a
variety of environments with a bewildering array of interfaces, access
protocols, and usage requirements. DLF Aquifer seeks to provide
scholars with consistent access to digital library collections pertaining
to nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. social history across
institutional boundaries. The collections are in a variety of
formats and include maps and photographs from the Library of Congress
historical collections; sheet music from the Sam DeVincent Collection of
American Sheet Music at Indiana University; and an array of regional
collections, such as Michigan County Histories from the University of
Michigan and Tennessee Documentary History from the University of
Tennessee, that will facilitate cross-regional studies when combined.
By integrating American Social History Online into a variety of local
environments, the project will bring the library to the scholar and make
distributed collections available through locally supported tools. The
project will take two years to develop and implement, from April 2007 to
March 2009.
The Digital Library Federation, founded in 1995, is a partnership
organization of academic libraries and related organizations that are
pioneering the use of electronic-information technologies to extend their
collections and services. Through its strategic and allied members, DLF
provides leadership for libraries by identifying standards and "best
practices" for digital collections and network access; coordinating
research and development in the libraries' use of technology; and
incubating projects and services that libraries need but cannot develop
individually. More information about DLF is available at
http://www.diglib.org/.
DLF is a distributed, networked organization, with central services
housed at the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), the
DLF Executive Director based at the University of California, Berkeley,
and the DLF Aquifer Director based at Stanford University. CLIR is an
independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the management
of information for research, teaching, and learning. More information
about CLIR is available at
http://www.clir.org/.
