It is imperative for CRRA member institutions to make their metadata available for harvesting via a Web server.
A couple of years ago, when the “Portal” was just beginning, the modus operandi for ingesting MARC and EAD metadata was to send it to Notre Dame, save it on local hard disk, and index it. That process worked then, but as we grow it becomes less and less scalable.
This page has become the home page for the usability efforts of the “Catholic Portal”.
The Digital Access Committee had a conference call on Thursday, May 12. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss usability studies. The resources (time and money) required to do the studies was emphasized. Similarly, the need to have the studies done with the intended audience of the Portal — upper-class man, graduate students, faculty, and scholars — was also stressed.
Ideally each institutional member of the Committee will facilitate and complete a set of usability studies by Christmas. In that vein, the following tentative list of who will do studies by has been drafted:
Individual committee members are expected to communicate with the committee as a whole by May 27 with more definite commitments.
For more information about the usability studies, see “Doing usability against the ‘Catholic Portal’“
This is the home page for a mailing list called CRRA-Tech.
The Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA) or “Catholic Portal” brings together data and metadata for the purposes of Catholic research and scholarship. This process is facilitated through a number of groups dealing with administrtive issues, collection issues, metadata issues, etc. CRRA-Tech is a mailing list intended to support and discuss the computer technology issues of the CRRA such as but not limited to the harvesting of content and metadata, the validation of content and metadata, indexing technologies, library “discovery systems”, the programming languages (PHP, Java, Perl, and Javascript) used, log file analysis, casscading stylesheets, debugging tools, the role of open source software, etc. In short, CRRA-Tech provides a forum for discussing the computer infrastructure of the Portal.
If supporting research and scholarship through the use of computer technology is a part of your daily work and if your employer is as member of the CRRA, then consider subscribing to CRRA-Tech. To subscribe:
You ought to get back a couple of confirmations, and you will be done.
On Friday, April 15 I had the honor and pleasure of giving a presentation to the Chicago Area Theological Library Association. This posting documents the experience.
To and from Berrien Springs (MI)