— Stephanie Haas

Funded in 1997 by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, “Linking Florida’s Natural Heritage” <http://susdl.fcla.edu/lfnh/index.html> was designed to allow researchers to search both library bibliographic databases and museum specimen databases distributed throughout the state of Florida through the same Web-based interface. This talk discusses the attempts to define common attributes of MARC and specimen records and the conundrum of taxonomic vs. common names.

— Bill Garrison

The Colorado Digitization Project (CDP) has had quite a bit of experience with metadata and metadata standards. The process used to reach consensus on metadata standards and to teach metadata will be described. In addition, the Western Trails Digitization Project and its metadata standards will be discussed. The CDP’s website is located at: http://coloradodigital.coalliance.org/. The CDP’s standards (including the metadata standards) are located at: http://coloradodigital.coalliance.org/standard.html. Descriptions of the workshops taught by the CDP are located at: http://coloradodigital.coalliance.org/workshop.html.

— Nuala A. Bennett

The “Teaching with digital content” project at the University of Illinois, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, seeks to develop a successful model program to integrate digital primary source materials into K-12 curriculum and assignments, as well as into the educational programs of museums and libraries. We have brought together a group of ten libraries and museums and their digital content with K-12 teachers and are identifying reliable methods of integrating this content into teaching units and learning guides, demonstrating innovative technology-based applications using these materials, and evaluating and reporting on their effectiveness. Libraries and museums contribute digitized primary source materials and accompanying metadata in Dublin Core-based format to an online database and search engine. This content provides valuable ties with state-mandated Learning Standards for K-12 institutions in Illinois, and we are working on transferring that model to other states. I will describe the development of a collaborative shared database using Dublin Core among very diverse institutions. URL: http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/tdc

— Tom Moritz

In the natural history museum environment, world wide, there are potentially many hundreds of millions of “digital information objects” requiring management. A 1998 article in Nature suggested there might be 3 billion specimens in the collections of 6,500 natural history institutions (Butler, D., H. Gee & C. Macilwain “Museum research comes off list of endangered species,” Nature, Volume 394 (No. 6689): 115-117 (1998). The cost of original, mediated indexing of these collections is potentially huge. A dilemma for the natural history community is the development of methods for applying and enhancing “original provenance” metadata. This problem – including a possible ontology for natural history information and discussion of possible XML applications, will be discussed in the light of our experience at AMNH in developing the American Museum Congo Expedition Website <http://diglib1.amnh.org>.