Contents
ISLA
&
IDA
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ISLA
(Information System for Los Angeles):
Is a time-space-time-keyword structured digital archive for all formats of information,
for the purposes of public access, research, and teaching. ISLA is a "regional
meta-collection," which means that it is composed of collections owned and housed by
many different regional institutions. ISLA integrates the objects from those disparate
collections so that each institution's data become more valuable, because they are
"fused" with the relevant associated data held by other institutions. ISLA will
be available soon over the Internet using the IDA (Integrated Digital Archives) interface
and database system. This maximizes exposure of and access to the many collections
integrated by it. Large and small regional institutions contributing their collections to
the ISLA regional meta-collection retain their full intellectual property rights, and
decide for themselves how to license their rights to users. These decisions are embedded
in the cataloging data for each item, and users will know automatically how much access
they will have to each item they have discovered via the ISLA-IDA search interface. ISLA
is sponsored and supported by the University of Southern California (USC), a
not-for-profit educational institution. USC developed ISLA and IDA to achieve a
breakthrough level of integration in the region's archival collections, so that the
broadest public can ask new kinds of questions about their region, and to enable more
effective and democratic modes of teaching and research.
IDA: Integrated Digital Archives,
version 1.0:
Is a software system conceived, designed and written at the University of Southern
California for the purpose of creating and managing very large digital library collections
of primary research materials in heterogeneous formats. It is a space-time-keyword-format
structured search-and-retrieval system, with special value to regional archival
collections. Through it, users will be able to search and retrieve archival objects
(photographs, texts, quantitative data, or audio-visual files), plus the authoritative
cataloging "metadata," by searching specific space, times, or keywords.Users
will also be able to "ingest" (scan, store, and catalog) new archival objects
for the ISLA
meta-collection from multiple locations. Version 1.0 of this system, with
search-and-retrieval (not ingest) capabilities was completed on 25 June 1998. Written in
the Java™ language and not debugged, this system is "proof-of-concept"
only. It needs to be taken to the next level, which is a commercial-strength internet
server.
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