Introduction
Subproject I: TELDAP Union Catalogs Project
The contents of TELDAP extend from the past to the present and its collections cover various fields, including biology, geology, archives, painting and calligraphy, implements, anthropology, and journalism, as well as different levels and types of e-learning materials. In organizing this data, however, each individual institution adopts different metadata standards and database systems. In order to integrate the content of diverse databases, Dublin Core (DC) metadata framework is applied in this project. The essential elements from various databases are mapped into the Dublin Core (DC) framework and imported into the Digital Archives Union Catalog. The original variable names in the original database are also recommended to export at the same time in order to retain the original information.
The Digital Archives Union Catalog aims to enable users to browse the sum total of TELDAP collections, the end results of Taiwan’s digital initiatives and knowledge engineering. Therefore, it will provide basic information (metadata) about collections and learning materials, previews of digitized files, a categorized framework and powerful search system, and most importantly, the links back to the original sources for more information.
As of 2009, the Digital Archives Union Catalog has collected and categorized more than three million pieces of item-level information from digital archives and provided more than 2.3 million pieces of digital images and media covering thematic variety from both nature and humanity domains. The Union Catalog also provides a cross-discipline and cross-institute search system for the benefit of academic research and other applications. Through the creation of keywords and guiding search functions, the practicality of the Union Catalog is enhanced. After the integration with the e-learning project, the Digital Archives Union Catalog adopts SQI (Simple Query Interface) cross-website searching interface technology to enable users searching several website simultaneously and elaborating the connections between e-learning materials and archive source materials.
The main tasks are as follows:
- Continuing to collect data to enrich the content of the catalog.
- Analyzing collected content and construct relational database and knowledge-based catalog.
- Exploring uniqueness and creating use value for the collections.
- Providing stable service for data retrieval and increasing the visibility of the Union Catalog.
- Cooperating with the Taiwan Digital Archives Expansion Project and increasing the diversification of archived collections.