KDL Content Now Exposed in Google

From Mary Molinaro:

Since the inception of the Kentuckiana Digital Library the digital objects contained therein have not been accessible to those users doing searches in search engines such as Google. All of the content in the KDL sat in a "dark archive" (not unlike many large digital archives). In late May Eric Weig and Michael Slone began working on a method to expose the KDL content to these search engines. Working together they developed a site map that can be crawled and indexed by Google. They have developed an automated process that adds new KDL content to the searchable site map.

We have discovered over the last few months that Google is actively indexing our content now and currently shows around 190,000 pages indexed. This has spiked our statistics considerably, as you can see below [see 9-11-09 update in SharePoint for table] that our numbers started to increase in June and July’s numbers are five times greater than May. The stats for August through August 12th indicate that we will have even more visitors in August!

I think this underscores the value of having librarians and programmers working together to make our valuable content available to users. Congratulations and thanks to Eric and Michael!