About Everglades Digital Library

The Everglades Digital Library (EDL) is a service of the Digital Collections Center at Florida International University Libraries in Miami, Florida. The EDL was established in 1996 to support research, education, decision making, and information resource management within the greater Everglades community. Since that time, the project has grown to serve patrons from around the world with Web-accessible digital collections, the online reference service 'Ask An Everglades Librarian', and other online information services.

Because much of the documentary history of south Florida is geographically dispersed across institutions and collections, the EDL actively collaborates with numerous scientific, government, library, and educational organizations in and around Florida . These organizations include:

Florida International University Libraries
Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA) and the Publication of Archival, Library, & Museum Materials( PALMM )
Everglades Education Consortium
Everglades National Park and the South Florida Natural Resources Center
the Historical Museum of Southern Florida
the University of Miami
the US Geological Survey's Everglades Priority Ecosystems Science Initiative
and others!

Activities

Our ongoing collaborative effort to make Everglades research freely available to people by Internet involves the following activities.
- Collaborative development of the Everglades Digital Library
- Design and technical management of the Everglades Information Network -- a comprehensive portal to south Florida environmental information
- Cooperative grant writing
- Original cataloging and indexing of unique materials, including web sites
- Digitization and web delivery of often-requested and/or fugitive curricula, government documents, museum holdings, and other materials.
- Preservation/conservation of rare archival materials
- Inter-library loan
- Digital reference and referral
Technology

The Everglades Digital Library currently utilizes Collection Workflow Integration System ( CWIS ) software created by the Internet Scout Project . CWIS conforms to international and academic standards for metadata and was specifically created to help build collections in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math for the National Science Digital Library ( NSDL ).

Some of the features of CWIS include:
- resource annotations and ratings (a la Amazon )
- keyword searching (with phrase and exclusion support a la Google )
- fielded searching
- recommender system (a la Amazon )
- OAI 2.0 export (with oai_dc and nsdl_dc schemas)
- RSS feed support
- integrated metadata editing tool
- user-definable schema (comes with full qualified Dublin Core )
- prepackaged taxonomies (includes GEM Subject taxonomy)
- user interface themes
- turnkey installation
CWIS also has functionality (PHP) separated from appearance (HTML), making it relatively easy to customize for your own site.

Contacts

Digital Collections Center,
Florida International University Libraries
URL: http://digitalcollections.fiu.edu
E-mail: dcc@fiu.edu

CWIS
The Internet Scout Project
http://scout.wisc.edu/
University of Wisconsin-Madison
scout@scout.wisc.edu