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At Andornot we are often asked to speak to classes of students at various university library and archives programs.  Last week I was invited to UBC to give a presentation on heritage convergence and GLAM projects to an Archives for Librarians class.  Many GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) initiatives are focused on large, complex collaborations but I wanted to share our successes with many smaller scale implementations.

These projects generally result in a new or updated website that allows users to perform a Google like single search across a mixture of content from various sources, either related to a particular topic or a particular location.  Some examples of these integrated searches include:
Local history resources focus:

Topic based resources focus:

All too often we find that clients are reluctant to explore possibilities for fear that it will be too expensive or too time consuming.  However we can guide you through the process and for many projects, can get a new search interface up and running for you in just a few days.  Data is exported from whatever local systems you use for administrative control of your records so there is minimal impact on your normal business processes or workflow.  (A project usually spans 2 to 3 months in total, to allow time for discussions, design, and a couple of rounds of feedback.)

We always remind clients that “It’s not about you” and the need to design a site that is geared to the search competencies and requirements of their end users.  This may mean agreeing on plain language terminology, minimizing acronyms and technical terms.

Feedback indicates that these multiple content sites have proved very popular.  Users love the single search interface and the integrated results lists.  We’ve heard that even staff who thought they knew their collections have been surprised to find documents they did not realize existed as they were in an unexpected database.  The modern look and functionality of these sites have helped boost the image of the organizations, and provided opportunities for enhanced community involvement through the social sharing, feedback and commenting features.

Take a look through some of these sites and then contact us to see how we can help you!

If you search the Halifax, Nova Scotia public library catalogue for “physiotherapy”, the first record to appear is for an educational pamphlet on “Physiotherapy services in Nova Scotia”  with a link to view it online as a PDF.  Subsequent records in the search results are also patient education pamphlets covering such topics as a guide to going home after surgery, ankle injuries and shoulder-strengthening exercises.

Halifax PL          CapitalHealth2

The Health Sciences Library of Capital Health has recently partnered with Halifax Public Libraries to add hundreds of these hospital-produced patient education pamphlet records to the public library’s catalogue. The goal is to make locally produced current information about health promotion, medical conditions, diagnostic tests, and surgical procedures more accessible to the public. These materials are also freely available and searchable from the website of the Health Sciences Library of Capital Health.

The hospital uses Inmagic DB/TextWorks to maintain the pamphlet database in a non-MARC format. Lara Killian from the Health Sciences Library spoke on the project at the recent CHLA conference in Montreal and described the project. Records are exported into MARC format from DB/TextWorks using a map created with the MARC Transformer available from Inmagic. These records are then massaged using the free MARCEdit software to create a file suitable for loading into the MARC-based AquaBrowser discovery software used by the Public Library.  There were some challenges with the MARC formatting, such as the display of French diacritical marks. At the Public Libraries, Dave MacNeil worked with AquaBrowser to tweak the formatting of the search result display to ensure that when these pamphlets show up, the direct link to the free PDF is easily identifiable.

This new initiative launched in June 2014, with the goal of increasing visibility and usage of the pamphlets by adding this new public access point.

If you need help with a similar project, please contact us for assistance.

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