Supervised by the libraries of the State University System (SUS) of Florida, PALMM -- Publication of Archival Library and Museum Materials -- will eventually serve as a searchable database of collections belonging to SUS institutions or geographically or thematically pertaining to the state of Florida. Currently, the Website has two large collections available: the Florida Heritage Collection (see the
December 15, 2000 Scout Report) and the Linking Florida's Natural Heritage collection. The latter features materials concerning Florida's landscape and fauna; the former "is an ongoing cooperative SUS project to digitize and provide web access to materials broadly representing Florida's history, culture, arts, literature, sciences and social sciences." Users are offered a variety of search and browse parameters, allowing them to customize the collections and institutions searched as well as the subjects and key terms. Unfortunately, many of the collections accessed through this database are not SUS collections, and the links are often simply to the main page of the Website holding a particular item or collection, not to the item or collection itself. While still clearly under construction, PALMM already serves as a powerful, if not always razor-sharp, tool for research into topics of Floridean history and geography.
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