The Polar Bear Expedition

The Polar Bear Expedition Web site is a project started by the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. It was created to explore online finding aids. They say that they are working continuously on find the next generation finding aids. They rely heavily on Open Source Software, as well as community feedback. The Web site was started in 2005, and they attempt to do all of the following: show the museum materials, create a collaborative space for researchers, and an example of a new structure for finding aids.

Collection Principles
"The "American Intervention in Northern Russia, 1918-1919," nicknamed the "Polar Bear Expedition," was a U.S. military intervention in northern Russia at the end of World War I. Since many of these soldiers originated from Michigan, the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, an archive documenting Michigan history, has collected materials related to this event since the 1960s."
For the Web site, the museum chose the most popular materials in order to secure the originals and prevent damage. They are trying to study better finding aids. Specifically, they want to use finding aids besides text, and social finding aids. This means focusing on what others have searched for, similar to what Amazon and Netflix do on their Web sites. Materials for the Web site first go through the museum, and they prefer originals, but they do have some reproductions.

Object Characteristics
The originals are mostly papers, diaries, and photographs. In that order as far as I can tell. In addition, some objects have been categorized as "letters", however, the papers are often letters themselves, so who knows why this naming distinction has been made. They have recently added some audio as well.
The site started out by including only what the Bentley Museum had, but they have since then both added information from users of the site as well as corrected mistakes that were included on the website. The images are jPEGs that come from 600 ppi (TIFF) originals.

Metadata
They used an EAD structure, and due to the complex nature of their finding aids, had to input a good deal of metadata by hand, rather than being able to automate it. At the bottom of Web pages, including administrative pages like the "about" section, you can see what other pages researchers who viewed said page have viewed. This is appears to be automated. This is very interesting, although the interface is not beautiful, it is a very innovative approach. However, since it is automated, you can see every time the researcher who viewed the page you are viewing clicked on "contact us" or "about" as well as other things they have researched. Perhaps in the future, a purely research related functionality could be added.
It is possible to browse by a number of category searches like name, collection, and subject. For the most part the metadata is under a folder that holds a name of a historical figure. Under that folder you can view a variety of materials like photographs and papers. The top of the file structure contains the information about the figure, the jpegs do not appear to contain searchable indexes at first glance. External links have been provided.
If you get an account, additional functionality would be added, like the ability to save your searches.

Audience
They claim that their main audience is people who were already dedicated to using the Polar Bear materials that have been collected (like researchers). The site makes it much more accessible to these users. I imagine that historians and genealogists are particularly interested in this material. Members have pointed out mistakes, which when researched, were found to be wrong, and subsequently corrected. This is similar to the Library of Congress' findings with their Flickr exhibit.