LALORC Project Status

The strength of the American Overseas Research Projects collaborating in this project lies in their global distribution, their access to local sources, and their cooperation with the Council of American Overseas Research Centers' Digital Library for International Research infrastructure. Neither the centers nor CAORC and DLIR initially had the staff to devise and implement technical solutions therefore some of the technical work was outsourced to US organizations. Projects were scheduled to commence at various stages over the first three years of the project allowing time to implement the various technical solutions that were required. The LALORC survey database was designed and programmed by Michigan State University's MATRIX Division so that participants could add data from  overseas locations. For the DLIR Union Catalog, a shared catalog with the Center for Research Libraries, CRL added several customized and individual online public access pages (OPACs) to accomodate the partner libraries in this project. Digital products were post-processed and hosted by Hudson Microimaging in Port Ewen, NY. Some cataloging for partner libraries was sent to OCLC's WorldCat Quality Management Services and Backstage Library Works. Arabic cataloging was done in-house with the assistance of Arabic language students from University of Chicago. In the last year of the project, Brian White joined the CAORC/DLIR staff as a Technical Assistant. He consolidated various components into a unified web site and portal. In order to accomplish this, the project was granted a one year extension and ended in September 2010.

Although the formal grant period has now concluded, participating AORCs and other CAORC partners are encouraged to continue this local outreach, identifying research resources for eventual public dissemination, thus sustaining the commitment started with this project. In addition, so much unexpected material was locally collected by some participants, e.g., in Pakistan, that not all of it could be processed in time for public dissemination by the grant period end. CAORC’s DLIR coordinator, who has overseen the final processing of all collected materials, is committed to pursue arrangements for treating this additional material and seeing it publicly disseminated.