With apologies for duplicate postings...

University of Rochester Receives Mellon Grant
for eXtensible Catalog (XC)

The University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries have received a
$283,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to begin planning and
requirements analysis for the development of an open-source online system
to unify access to traditional and digital library resources. The new
system, known as eXtensible Catalog (XC), has the potential to allow future
library users to get more out of academic library collections, and to give
academic libraries more control over how best to help library users gather
information.

The first phase of the analysis will produce a plan that will include:

§ A survey of related projects that will assess the feasibility of
bringing together and building upon work being done at other institutions
§ An analysis of freely-available source code that could be
incorporated into the development of XC
§ Outreach to other academic institutions doing similar work at
libraries
§ Recommendations for the metadata requirements of the new system,
informed by data models that focus on how metadata helps people gather and
understand information
§ An analysis of existing user studies and recommendations for
additional studies of user practices to guide the development of XC
§ An analysis of needs for the XC system within academic libraries

The complete press release for the project is available at:
http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2518. For additional
information, please contact one of the XC Co-Principal Investigators:
David Lindahl, Director of Digital Initiatives
([log in to unmask])
Jennifer Bowen, Head of Cataloging ([log in to unmask])
Nancy Fried Foster, Lead Anthropologist ([log in to unmask])

Jennifer Bowen
Head of Cataloging
University of Rochester