The beginning

Yesterday my sabbatical officially began. I drove to a cottage in Michigan to remove myself from the normal routine and focus on my sabbatical work. It's cold here! The public library will definitely be the place to work.

The public library has a wireless access point. That enables me to create this blog, as well as dig into my sabbatical topic. I plan to lay out the many facets of digital archives and learn as much as I can before my sojourn to Los Angeles and USC.

Facets like:
what types of archives are other academic institutions putting up
what platforms are they using
what are their interfaces like
how do they handle copyrighted material
how do they organize the material
do they use federated searching of some kind across various archives
what sorts of metadata do they use
what exactly has MIT got in D-Space thus far
what are other technical institutions doing?
how is USC using Documentum, a product being used by OhioLINK
who has the best models for my needs?

I am sure I can glean a lot by viewing web sites for many schools. It's delightful to sit here by the library window with a view of Lake Michigan and search the web in pursuit of answers to these many questions.