The news of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarding a $500,000, three-year National Leadership Grant to four partner organizations is being celebrated. It is safe to say that the four organizations – the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Montana State University, OCLC Research, and the University of New Mexico— are certainly celebrating the grants to perform research and recommend best practices that will improve data collection and information sharing for institutional repositories and digitized collections. This interesting information came from the Association of Research Libraries in their release, “Measuring Up: Assessing Use of Digital Repositories and the Resulting Impact” Project Receives IMLS Grant.”

The grant project, “Measuring Up: Assessing Use of Digital Repositories and the Resulting Impact,” will investigate the challenges that libraries face in producing accurate reports of the use of their digital repositories through web analytics. One of those challenges is the lack of standardization, resulting in inaccurate statistics.

Standardization is what drives consistency and optimization. It is the cornerstone for making content findable. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.