Western Waters Digital Library

Western Waters Digital Library
Collection Principles
This digital library is a collaborative effort of 12 universities in the Western US and contains reports, literature, transcripts, water project records, personal papers, photo and video materials, all related to the Columbia, Colorado, Platte, and Rio Grande river basins. The library's materials reside on the different university websites but accessible through the main site. Funding was originally from an IMLS NL grant and subsequent grants have enabled the collection to grow. The site makes it easy to find information about the characteristics of the collection and information about any of the individual objects. The collection items are usually accessible and all images include good, descriptive alt tags.
Object Characteristics & Metadata
Images are viewable as thumbnails which take you to a page with a zoomable image and lots of metadata for each object with lots of links within that metadata.
Image digitization varies a bit between collections but all are done based on information from the following:

• Draft Benchmark for Digital Reproductions of Printed Books and Serial Publications, 30 July 2001
• Guides to Quality in Visual Resource Imaging, July 2000
• Handbook for Digital Projects: A Management Tool for Preservation and Access, 2000
• Western States Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices version 2.0 (PDF)

Most images come from highresolution master images (up to around 1200dpi).
Sample metadata categories for images are:

Image File Name, Title, Description, Subject, Location, Material type, Identifier, Date.Original, Collection , Date.Digital, Digital Publisher, Type, Format, Digital Specifications, Cited by, Contributing Institution, Rights, File size, Print Orders (where to order them).

Text objects (not images of text) are available in html or pdf formats and can also be ordered from the collections. Images of text often present a problem because they are presented as images without accompanying machine-readable text, so those with disabilities would have difficulty with them.

Intended User Audience

The intended audience appears to be researchers, scholars, and the general public as well. I think the main audience is researchers, scholars, and students, though.

Overall a very nice digital library but could do with some machine readable text versions of old newspaper clippings and other images of text.

Ann Dobbs