Collaboration Enabling Internet Resource Collection-Building Software and Technologies

Over the last decade the Library of the University of California, Riverside and its collaborators have developed a number of systems, service designs, and projects that utilize innovative technologies to foster better Internet finding tools in libraries and more cooperative and efficient effort in Internet link and metadata collection building. The open-source software and projects discussed represent appropriate technologies and sustainable strategies that we believe will help Internet portals, digital libraries, virtual libraries, library catalogs-with-portal-like-capabilities (IPDVLCs), and related collection-building efforts in academia to better scale and more accurately anticipate and meet the needs of scholarly and educational users. Our work and its intent is best introduced by providing an overview of the projects, services, and software that we have been working on for the last several years: iVia, INFOMINE, and Data Fountains. iVia will be described in depth from the standpoints of its overall system, content and uses supported, end-user features, content development and management features for institutional collaborators, features for individual expert content builders, and incentives for collaborative collection building. iVia iVia (http://infomine.ucr.edu/iVia/) is a portal or virtual library collection-building software platform (Mitchell et. al., 2003). It was designed to support multiple institutions and projects in collaborative collectionbuilding efforts. The system (or components) is used by INFOMINE and Steve Mitchell, iVia and Data Fountains Projects Coordinator, Science Library, University of California at Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521 605 mitchell/collection-building software the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) of the National Science Foundation, among others. The software, written primarily in C++, is licensed as open source and is available to all. iVia features a very large number of custom-configurable user interfaces and information retrieval options to support the institutional identity management (that is, branding) and user finding needs of diverse, collaborating organizations. Institutional collaborators will also be able to avail themselves of multiple metadata creation options, including support for multiple “production lines” and levels of editorial control. Resourceand labor-saving machine assistance is featured and used to semiand/or fully-automate a number of tasks in both Internet resource identification and metadata generation. The