Aquifer American Social History Online (AASHO): One Place - Many Collections

Aquifer American Social History Online, a project of the Digital Library Federation, provides scholars with access to distributed digital library collections pertaining to 19th and 20th century United States social history. AASHO is available through locally supported tools so that you can find, organize, use, and share items from diverse collections. To optimize your teaching, learning and research while using Aquifer American Social History Online, we recommend that you:

• Sign up for an OpenID to use when you login to AASHO. With OpenID, you create a single username and password that you can use to log into an increasing number of sites without registering each time. You can use Aquifer American Social History Online without registering, but logging in with your OpenID allows you to save your search histories, set your profile preferences, access a record in its native format, and access metadata transformation tools.
• Download and install the Zotero extention. Zotero is a free, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather and organize resources (bibliography or full text of articles), and then lets you annotate, organize and share the results of your research. Please note that Zotero works only in Firefox.
• If your research or teaching requires the use of images, we include support for the University of Virginia Library's Collectus and ImageViewer tools. To view and organize newly created or previously saved image collections, and to generate slide shows for use in the classroom, right click on the Collectus icon which is near the top of all images shown on your search results page. Note that for some images the only size currently available is thumbnail. We are actively working to provide access to at least screen-size images for all objects in the portal.

We welcome new partners and new collections. To find out more about partnering and contributing, please contact us.

Aquifer American Social History Online Products for Digital Library Development:

Guidelines

The Collection Submission document details how to make your collection available for harvesting.

Digital Library Federation / Aquifer Implementation Guidelines for Sharable Metadata and release notes, describing how MODS should be used for sharing metadata for use in the Aquifer initiative

MODS Guidelines Levels of Adoption provides guidance on the use of MODS for metadata. This document describes five general categories of user functionality that are likely to be supported by following specific recommendations from the Guidelines. It documents what functionality is possible when certain elements of the Guidelines are followed.

FAQ for MODS Guidelines Implementers is designed to help participants in the DLF Aquifer initiative implement the project's MODS Guidelines.

The Data Processing for Aquifer records details indexing, faceting and display of MODS fields for searchable components of AASHO.

Tools

The DLF Collection Registry includes a non-exhaustive list of publicly accessible digital collections created or developed by DLF partners and allies. New collections are being added over time. This registry includes a full description of each collection. Full descriptions of sub-collections are included as well where appropriate.

MARC to Aquifer MODS XSLT Stylesheet

An Asset Action package is an XML-defined set of actionable URIs for a digital resource that delivers named, typed actions for that resource.

Thumbgrabber is an instance of an asset action and grabs a surrogate when an action asset is unavailable. It is an open source application and was developed to capture, generate, and maintain thumbnails and thumbshots from Web resources referenced in descriptive metadata. Thumbgrabber can be downloaded from the UIUC OAI Metadata Harvesting Project page on SourceForge.net. Thumbgrabber web service test page can be found here.

CDL's Date Normalization Utility is a Java utility that takes non-machine readable Common Era dates as input and outputs machine-readable dates in order to enhance digital collections to support date range queries. The output is compliant with the TEMPER (Temporal Enumerated Ranges) specification.

A list of tools or packages used to build the Aquifer American Social History Online site, including Ruby on Rails and the GEMS installed on the AASHO server.