Members of the Greater Western Library Alliance Interlibrary Loan Committee have spent more than two years developing a Best Practices model for Interlibrary Borrowing and Lending for consortia and local operations. The model includes the practices to be followed, a monitoring plan, and a process for regular evaluation. The GWLA Interlibrary Loan Committee has not yet determined the regular evaluation process, including the timeline. We anticipate that process being established in Spring 2003.

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In order to organize the widely dispersed manuscripts of Walt Whitman, The Walt Whitman Archive, in partnership with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, has utilized the power of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) to create a single, scholarly enhanced guide to Whitman's poetry manuscripts. This integrated finding guide to Whitman's poetry manuscripts includes item-level description, links to repository guides that provide both location information and collection context, links to digital images of the manuscripts, and links to Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) transcriptions. In creating such a guide, we had to work cooperatively across disciplines and institutions, expand the use of EAD, and address how best to integrate description and transcription (EAD and TEI files). This essay describes our procedure as we created the integrated guide. From collecting finding aids and creating partnerships with other institutions, to developing a proper encoding standard and establishing good cross-department working relations, our project has embodied many of the benefits and challenges of digital work in the humanities. By identifying our procedures, and by laying out our future hurdles, we hope we can advance knowledge about Whitman and about how scholars and archivists can collaborate effectively to advance research, improve access, and realize the potential of EAD.

an electronic collation of documents (URL: http://0-www.digital.library.okstate.edu. library.unl.edu/kappler/) created by American Indian tribes and the federal government was presented as an effective collection development resource. That digital work provides the final text of 366 of the 375 American Indian treaties recognized by the United States Department of State. The present research note describes an electronic suite that supplies access to the texts of the remaining nine treaties, so that its use -in combination with the Oklahoma State University materials -will furnish an avenue to all of these historical instruments. Research examples, for this document set and in comparison to the Kappler collation, are provided.

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