The Consortium is very happy to announce that we have completed another upgrade of the Collections Search Hub. Among other enhancements, the search now incorporates finding aids.
The original search hub, created in 2009, included catalog records available across multiple members' collections. By 2011, the hub contained 1.4 million records from nine member institutions.
In the last two years, the Consortium has added finding aids for members' collections to the search. The hardware, software and procedures have been been updated to: handle more data and users; allow for a broader range of data standards used by member institutions; automate data collection and indexing as much as possible; increase the frequency of updates; simplify the addition of new data; and offer more information to users.
The Consortium's search hub is now among the largest in the world. It currently allows for searching more than 6.1 million catalog records from 26 institutions, as well as more than 41,000 finding aids from 16 institutions. We will continue to add data from our remaining members, and from new institutions as they join the Consortium.
The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation funded both the establishment of the search hub in 2009 and this important update. We are grateful for their support of this important resource, which helps to foster new scholarship, and promotes the use of member institutions' collections.