Unit 10

I searched the website Cyclades: An Open Collaborative Virtual Archive Environment. Its partners are the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, the Institute of Computer Science, Fraunhofer FIT among others. It is a collaborative virtual archive service that has a core set of cross-archive value-added services. This allows for communication and collaboration between services.
I searched GEO-Leo which was a collection of earth science and mining related bibliographic records. There were some dead ends but most of the links worked and I got some good information from the collection. The collection by the German Research Association is offered to all German academics and scientists. It gives access to relevant books, journals and information resources.
I looked at Sheet Music Consortium. The members are UC Los Angeles, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University. This is what I expect from a federated collection. The search was easy and I actually found the sheet music I was looking for. Some of the sheet music was not accessible because of copyright but all that I looked at were. Some of the searches took me to another site. “The Maine Music Box” where I was able to access the sheet music.
The last site I looked at was the Oaister site in the tech assignment. It was very large and well thought out. I was able to navigate through the different features with little trouble. Everything I clicked on had more things to click on. It has so many records and contributors that it might be overwhelming to some people.
I think a good federated collection has continuity and flow. The movement through the site must be fluid. The collection should be connected and well thought out. The collections I looked at were all at different levels of usability. I had a hard time finding anything in the first two sites I looked at. They seemed cumbersome and had a number of dead ends. The last two were much more successful. I don’t think the number of records or contributors is a negative for the Oiaster site because it is organized well and was easy to navigate. The sheet music site also had a large number of records but was not hard to navigante. I think the organization of the site is more important than the number of records it has.