The open parks network

The goal of the Open Parks Network (OPN) is to create a portal that connects park managers, researchers, policy makers, and citizens to each other and to valuable cultural resources related. Led by Clemson University in collaboration with the National Parks Service and Purdue University, OPN is designed to provide a virtual community of professionals in parks and protected areas with the tools, resources, and knowledge base they need to conduct intensive research, perform their jobs duties effectively, and share information with colleagues and users on an international scale. To date, 80,000 of 200,000 archival images and 500,000 out of 2 million bound pages have been digitized from various parks, and a beta version of the platform will be available for demonstration in March 2013. The project includes the integration of a Fedora repository with the Joomla! content management system with extensions to enable GIS functionality, expose metadata as Linked Data and for harvest using OAI-PMH, and enable users to create their own custom collections.