"Now, what I want is Facts...Facts alone are wanted in life."
-Charles Dickens

The testbed collections of the University of Michigan's NSF/ARPA/NASA Digital Library Project have two primary goals: sufficient depth and diversity to support the architectural goals of the project's research agenda and usefulness to the target user communities. The general topical framework is earth and space science, broadly defined to include environmental studies and other interdisciplinary areas which border on life, natural, and social sciences. A mix of commercial, government, association, institutional, and individual sources are included.

Commercial content licensed or contributed by our publisher partners focuses on timely journal literature and reference resources. These commercial resources include:

• Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (McGraw Hill)
• 200 core and popular journals (UMI)
• Encyclopedia Americana (Grolier's)
• 50 scientific journals (Elsevier) [Note: a related research effort, Pricing Electronic Access to Knowledge, includes all 1100 Elsevier journals.]
• Encyclopedia Britannica (Encyclopedia Britannica)

Additional publishers have provided sample content for testing and analysis.

Since distributed access is a project goal, processes of identifying remote resources are equally important as local acquisition. Capabilities to harvest indexes on the Internet for suitable sites and autoregister (in the Conspectus) and manage these resources have been created. In addition, these Internet sites have been processed as "web books" to define the boundaries and index the content of significant Internet resources. Hundreds of Internet sites (thousands of pages) have been incorporated through this process.

The project's goals include diverse user groups, including the on-campus community, public libraries, and high school communities (teachers, students, media specialists, librarians). The local development of curricular content for the high school audiences has been a key activity as well.