Tuesday, September 07, 2004

Hudson Valley Heritage

The Southeastern NY Library Resources Council has coordinated a regional digitization project named Hudson Valley Heritage (http://www.hudsonvalleyheritage.org/). (This region covers nine counties just north of of New York City.)

The homepage of the web site places information about the digital initiative and digitization first, then gives information on the collections that are currently featured. This order to the hompage makes one wonder if the emphasis of the site is on providing information and resources about digitization or providing access to digitized collections. My first reaction is that site is not meant for end-users, as it is currently organized, but for people in the region who are involved in digitization. If that is what the group intended, then they succeeded. However, this might be a place where they could build different front-ends (homepages) for different uses. Think of it as different doorways leading to the same room. There could be a doorway (homepage) geared towards end-users who want to view the collections and another doorway (homepage) for organizations who are interested in the nuts-n-bolts of digitization. The back-ends could use the same information (images, etc.) but would present the information differently depending on the needs of that view's user. The ability to use content multiples ways is one of the benefits of a digitization project. A well-thought out project (what IMLS refers to as a third stage project) will take advantage of the ability to reuse and repurpose content to meet different user needs.

No comments: