| Todd Grappone Associate Executive Director, Information Development & Management University of Southern California |
R. Wayne Shoaf Director, Information Development Organization and Retrieval University of Southern California |
The original goal of USC’s Gandhara Project was to provide a search interface to all metadata regarding resources and locally produced research. This goal has largely been realized. By combining a simple locally developed XML wrapper technology with open-source software and programming labor resources, we have developed an elegant open standards based library information system that will be the basis for our future knowledge systems at USC. We created a system to organically store, index and represent items regardless of format or origin. In addition, by using XML and open standards we are developing a user-centered tool for designing online libraries. Using ingest harvesting and crawling technology, Gandhara creates a single search interface to the USC integrated library system (ILS), the USC Digital Archive, Institutional Repository, online chat reference sessions, the usc.edu web site as well as the medical library catalog. Not only does Gandhara offer new bibliographic services but it also allows for back-end flexibility. In the system currently being developed, indexing is not wedded to a single metadata standard; any resource that produces XML can be indexed and searched. By focusing on developing collection-to-collection and collection-to-user data feeds, the “locked box” of an ILS is opened. This presentation will discuss the development of the system, a demonstration of the current system and next steps.
