Western Waters Digital Library

I chose the Western Waters Digital Library to investigate primarily because I was intrigued by its description of itself. The website stated that the WWDL contained "government reports, classic water literature, legal transcripts, water project records, personal papers, photographic collections, and video materials about the Columbia, Colorado, Platte, and Rio Grande river basins." I wanted to find out how this library could meld government reports with "classic water literature".

The WWDL is a collaborative regional project created by twelve university libraries in eight western states, joined by their membership in the Greater Western Library Alliance. The gateway website is hosted by the University of Utah. Right from the home page there is a search box, for which you can choose to search text, images, audio, video -- or the default, all. There's even a clickable map of the country that shows the Western rivers of interest. When you click on the hyperlinked areas, you are shown links to to materials that relate to that region. (Unfortunately, the links don't actually connect yet.)

Selection Principles
The stated mission of the WWDL is to digitize and make public "key materials from participating libraries to lay the foundation for continued development of a comprehensive digital information resource about water in the western United States. The vision of the WWDL is to increase geographic coverage, subject matter, and contributing institutions incrementally over time as the project develops." I was interested to check out the technical details page, but three out of the four links to resources listed were broken. Only Draft Benchmark for Digital Reproductions of Printed Books and Serial Publications, 30 July 2001 actually worked.

Metadata & Object Characteristics
You can search or browse -- browsing you can choose from a drop-down menu of subjects, people, places, or 'signature collections'. I chose 'Buffalo Bill Cody" as my person, and was taken to four thumbnail scans of articles related to Buffalo Bill. Each item listed image, title, description, and date. When you clicked on a single item, you saw the full metadata -- original title index, newspaper source, title, description, subject keywords, date, subject headings, resource type, resource identifier, format use (e.g. Image/JPEG), source (e.g. State history box 143) and language. Clicking on the individual item would take you to the website of the institution that actually owns that item, but this jump is relatively seamless.

The metadata for the images was especially impressive; tons of keywords and subject headings indexed, a link to an ordering page (when applicable), and very informative scanning notes; e.g., "Scanned from a photographic print using a Microtek Scanmaker 9600XL at 100 dpi in JPEG format at compression rate 3 and resized to 768x512 ppi. 2000." You can click on the thumbnail to get to a larger (~60kb), downloadable image.

The metadata provided didn't seem to hold exactly consistent across institutions or media. For example, the video "Water is for Fightin'" also included within its metadata fields for creator(s), rights management institution, and name of the metadata cataloguer. That said, I didn't find that this inconsistency deterred from the usefulness or accuracy of the library in any way. Windows Media is the only compatible media player accessible, which was frustrating to this Mac user.

Audience
I get the feeling that this digital library is a point of pride for the 11 co-host institutions, as well as for the sponsoring organizations. Besides being of interest to students and faculty, I think that the library would be of great use and interest to amateur historians, water resource and environmental professionals, and regular folk who live near any of these rivers or basins.

General Notes
Overall, I was very impressed with the collection's concern for usability and its clean, uncluttered interface. I was also very impressed that there is a link to a Zoomerang survey on the home page, asking users for more information about the nature of their research and to offer users the chance to give constructive feedback on the collection.