Monticello Electronic Library

The Monticello Electronic Library is an evolving component of the Southeastern Library Network's Electronic Information Services. Its major goals are :

• to facilitate the establishment of standards among many user communities for sharing basic information resources throughout the southeastern United States,
  
• to demonstrate the application of those standards in distributed applications,
  
• to provide structured access to very different types of information resources through indexed metadata repositories.

The project has been funded through the U.S. Department of Commerce NTIA TIIAP program, with matching funds from SOLINET. Project partners are SURA (Southeastern Universities Research Association), OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), and the Southern Growth Policies Board (SGPB).

SOLINET has administered two components of the Monticello Electronic Library:

The Public Information Project began in order to develop a regional approach to sharing government information, initially that generated at the state level. The project has been building consensus for standards for the sharing of public information. Priorities emerging from the early work centered around adherence to standards, specifically the federal Government Information Locator Service (GILS) Current directions for this project include solidifying state adoption of standards for online information, and expansion of the program to include local community information.

The Southeastern Special Collections Access Project (SESCA) focuses on innovative ways to make archival, manuscript, and special collections more available. SESCA planning included a regional inventory and identification of indexing methods, as well as incentives for online access and regional coordination. The implementation of the project has included adoption of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) as the means for making special collections finding aids available electronically.

Virginia Tech administers an another component of the Monticello Electronic Library, through its National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations Project (NDLTD). This project is funded through the U.S. Department of Education and SURA.

Project links are through http://www.solinet.net/ for the SOLINET administered components and http://www.ndltd/org/ for the Virginia Tech administered components.

webmgr@cni.org