“A Peek Inside USDA’s Massive Digital Library Project”

From FierceGovernmentIT:

Two and half years ago the Agriculture Department started work on a project it hopes will combine 10 databases of reference material, creating integrated search and alerts for at least 100 million records. Now, after bringing together seven legacy platforms–some utilizing systems that date back to the 1980’s–USDA’s DigiTop e-world houses a total of 43,506,532 records.
When complete, DigiTop will allow users to search citation databases, full-text journals, directories, books, newspapers, and economic, political and business information, said Stan Kosecki, head of the information services and collections branch of the national agriculture library.
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“Users routinely retrieve 100,000, 200,000 or 300,000 records [in a search] and they choose to operate on that,” said Matthew Treskon, digital service librarian-DigiTop of the national agriculture library.

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