The Everglades Digital Library is an effort of Florida International University Libraries to make Everglades research freely available over the internet. This portal provides access to three main collections: the Everglades Education Consortium, Everglades Online, and Reclaiming the Everglades: South Florida’s Natural History, 1884 to 1934. A collaborative effort, the Everglades Digital Library contains documents from the Florida Center for Library Automation, Everglades National Park, the South Florida Natural Resources Center, the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, the University of Miami, and the U.S. Geological Survey’s Everglades Priority Ecosystems Science Initiative.
Collection Principles
Like other digital libraries that serve as portals to diverse collections, the Everglades Digital Library’s guiding objective seems to be the aggregation of as much information as possible related to this unique geographic region, in the form of quality research and primary documents. Determinations of the quality of individual resources is presumably made on the basis of the reputation and authority of their contributing institution. Although it is not explicitly stated on their website, it seems that the library is looking to continue expanding its collection (which currently includes about 470 items), given the fact that some resource types listed under the advanced search currently contain no items.
Object Characteristics
The Everglades Digital Library supports a broad range of resource types, from news and journal articles to maps and photographs, to letters and sheet music to lesson plans. A section of digitized books appears to be coming soon. When you select an item, you are taken to the website of the contributing collection in order to view it. The Reclaiming the Everglades collection, which contributes more documents than any other collection, provides both JPEG and PDF versions of most documents, with no zooming capacity.
Metadata
This digital library does a good job of providing ample bibliographic metadata. In addition to basic title, author, and date information, records also include audience level, format, rights information, language, subjects, resource type, a unique identifier, and, in some cases, a screenshot of the resource. The advanced search option allows users to search by many of these characteristics. As far as I was able to tell, no information is available on the website about how the various resources were digitized – presumably each contributing body had its own procedure.
Intended Audience
This resource is clearly intended for a research audience, but both formal academic research and informal research by the interested amateur can be supported. Any individual can register with the site and provide annotations and ratings for the various resources and then, as with Amazon, receive recommendations for other resources that may be of interest. This inclusion of user-generated content and interactivity seems designed to appeal specifically to the “general public” and not the scholarly research community. From my perusal of the site, it seemed that these features have not yet been taken advantage of to any great extent, but I was unable to determine how recently such capabilities had been added to the library.
Although it currently doesn’t contain quite the quantity of resources that would be desirable for such a portal (when I searched for alligator, I only found 3 documents), I think that as it grows the Everglades Digital Library has the potential to quite useful.
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