Final version
In the last five years there has been significant growth in museum/library collaboration, in part due to the Institute of Museum and Library Services national leadership program and in part due to the growing realization that both libraries and museums are holders of collections that represent our rich and diverse culture heritage.
Museum/library collaboration isn't just occurring in the United States. In 1999, the European Commission's Information Society Directorate General appointed a working group to develop a research framework for archives, libraries and museums that would support their work in the networked environment. The primary purpose of the research framework is to support access to resources available on the Internet. The document notes that the framework is based on the assumption, "...that libraries, archives and museums have shared research interests... can identify several broad goals that underpin these and encourage collaborative activity.... " [1]. The goals are:
While these institutions share similar goals and missions, there is no common vocabulary, no common policies on access and use by the public, no common term for this group of institutions, and no common standards to support the goal of access.
The report summaries that these institutions:
Within this common vision, each of the communities addresses the goals within their own curatorial traditions and organizational contexts, and specific national or administrative framework. "The recognition that common interests converge on the Internet, driven by the desire to release the value of their collections...that support creative use by as many users as possible." [4] The participating institutions understand that users desire increased access to the intellectual and cultural materials in a flexible manner, without concern for who owns the resource. "To support this need, they recognize the need for services that provide unified routes into their deep collective resources...." [5]. At the same time these institutions are all developing their own approaches for organization and access to their resources. They may be working with subject based peer institutions across the continent or internationally to develop versions of Dublin Core (DC) or the Encoded Archival Description (EAD); or they maybe working within their type of organization to develop Visual Resources Association (VRA) description for visual resources. There is little evidence of work across institutions of different types at the implementation stage.
Assuming that U.S. museums, libraries and archives share the same goals and vision as our European colleagues, then the issues discussed at the 'Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium' must be discussed within a community that involves our museum and archive colleagues. For as the EC paper notes, without providing our common users with a means of identifying the unique resources and special collections, the mission of access to our heritage will be severely restricted. Several papers, including that by Caroline Arms, touch on the issues related to the collaboration of many institutions on the American Memory Project [6].
This paper will focus on the specific experiences of the Colorado Digitization Project (CDP) related to accessing a diverse set of primary resources held by many different cultural heritage institutions. The paper will address issues that arise from different cataloging and metadata standards and diverse user populations and needs. The biggest challenge for the CDP is to bring metadata from the various institutions together in a single union catalog and to present the user with retrieval of digital objects stored in a distributed network environment.
Description of the project:
The Colorado Digitization Project begun in the fall of 1998, is a collaborative initiative involving Colorado's archives, historical societies, libraries, and museums. The CDP's goal is to create a virtual digital collection of resources that provide the people of Colorado access to the rich historical, scientific and cultural resources of the state. Project participants will be able to contribute content that has been reformatted into digital format, as well as the