ACE
Advanced Collection Environment
Ace is an OCLC Research project investigating centralized solutions to personal collection management. We plan to have a prototype system operational in the fall of 2001.
Features:
- Collections: Support the features needed to manage various collections, from books to handplanes to digitized music
- Size: Collections ranging from a few hundred to 10,000 items
- Audience: Initially we are concentrating on personal collections
- Web based: Ace is controlled via standard Web browsers
- Centrally hosted: Catalogs and software are all hosted at OCLC
- Metadata: Dublin Core is Ace's main metadata format
General Approach
Ace is a centrally hosted service. This limits us somewhat in the amount of interactivity the Ace files can have with local applications, but offers a number of advantages:
- Very low barrier to entry. The system is ready when you are
- Central hosting and backup very desirable for inventory control records
- Promotes sharing of collection information and community building
Charging will be based on storage use. Use with limited storage will be free during the research project
Goals
- Develop a system that can expand into institutional collections
- Increase our knowledge of how to support collections of varying complexity in an increasingly digital world
- Develop prototype systems which generate a high demand for the services
Relationship to other projects
CORC
The Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (which started as a Research project, but is now available to all OCLC cataloging members) was oriented towards the cataloging of electronic resources by libraries. As CORC moved to a productions system the emphasis was primarily on integration of this approach with the standard WorldCat cataloging system.
Ace expects to provide much more customization and full-featured service directed primarily to individuals' collection management problems, features outside the current WorldCat.
ALCME
Project Ace is a follow-on to the ALCME project which was primarily involved with the OAI Metadata Harvesting Initiative and electronic theses and dissertations (see the ALCME web page).
Staff
The following OCLC staff are currently associated with Project Ace:
- Tom Dehn
- Thom Hickey (project lead)
- Ralph LeVan
- Lorraine Normore
- Lance Osborne
- Tom Terrall
- Jenny Toves
- Jeff Young
Status
We are using Feature Driven Development for our project methodology.
Tentative schedule:
| 2001 August | Develop overall model and informal features list |
| 2001 September | Detailed plan by feature, start coding cycles |
| 2001 October | Usable system up |
| 2001 November | System opened up to general use |
| 2002 January | End of first development cycle |
Other sites
There are numerous Web sites dedicated to collections. Here are a few:
collectors.org
collectors.com
rarebooks.org
software4collectors.com
wizardworld.com
Contact: Thom Hickey
Last modified: Tue Mar 23 12:25:40 Eastern Standard Time 2004