Oaister Harvesting

I reviewed several service provider sites at www.openarchives.org and at gita.grainger.uiuc.edu. Below are sites that I reviewed and some comments for each:

1) Sheet Music Consortium (digital.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic).
I searched this collection using the keyword "liquor" to search for music associated with Prohibition and the Temperance movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My search returned 7 results - 1 at the Library of Congress and 6 at Duke University. To get to the individual items listed in the search results, the link from the items at Duke University took me straight to the image of the first page of music, while the links from the Library of Congress took me to a page similar to the one at the Consortium site where I had to select the item again to view the scanned image of the music.

I found it interesting that the two repositories chose different routes to displaying the images of the sheet music - and honestly, I found the Library of Congress approach, with the duplicitous descriptive record and second button to select, slightly annoying after having been able to get to the material from Duke University more easily.

However, this difference in delivery is one that should be addressed for this and other collaborative projects to ensure consistency in look and feel for the end users.

2. The second collection I looked at was Cornucopia (www.cornucopia.org.uk). This site is an online database of more than 6,000 collections across the UK. I searched for the term "Drake" and retrieved 9 results - 6 from the Tynwhitt Drake Museum, 2 from the Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, and 1 from the Regis Philpot Museum.

This site was not at all what I expected as in my search results there were not digital images - just a site of catalog records similar to what you might find on OCLC's FirstSearch. There is a descriptive catalog record with a link to the website of the institution, and that is about it. I question why this site, as interesting and useful as it is, is listed at gita.grainger.uiuc.edu.

3. The third site I looked at was MeIND at the Hochschulbibliothekszentrum des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen. This site is divided into different types of documents: archives; articles/preprints; links; monographs, congresses & festschrifts; digital & multimedia; regional information; conference proceedings; and serials. Also, there is the option to search by Dewey Decimal Classification.

I searched the term "Bach" and received 257 results in a variety of languages including English, German and Spanish. Results were grouped by genre.

What surprised me was the fact that there were links to items at the Library of Congress here in the U.S. on this site. I don't know why I was surprised as the ultimate goal of digital collections is to promote and give access to collections - which this very much does. I was just surprised that I was at a website in Germany that pointed me to a resource that is a few hours northeast of where I live.

I think that these sites are good, but there is a fear in the back of my mind that ultimately we will suffer from "information overload". I remember when I first discovered Barnes and Noble - the really huge locations in New York City - and I just fell in love. I would hang out there for hours just absorbing it all and wandering aimlessly through the aisles. I did the same at Tower Records in Los Angeles. It was all exciting and new - and I was thrilled to have such access to books and music, a degree of which I had never experienced (I was no longer captive to the bestseller or Billboard lists!). However, after a while, I just found it to be claustrophobic - there was just too much to choose from and I would find my self wandering around - not soaking it all in, but desperately trying to find something that would catch my attention. Information overload.

While a tremendously huge repository of institutions and collections sounds great (the one-stop shop for all things archival and library-ish), there is the need to temper it a little. I think that we, as humans, can only absorb so much and process so much before we just get overwhelmed and shut down. I can see the library and archives communities posting so much information online that it is underutilized because there is too much and the novelty of digital collections have worn off a bit. While I believe that collaborative efforts are ultimately beneficial, we should consider a moderate scope to our endeavors so as not to overwhelm our users and ultimately ourselves. Maybe there is a structure to digital collections that would help alleviate this, but I am not aware of one at the moment - but it certainly does deserve consideration....