[Web4lib] (Govt) Digitized resources, organization, and usability?

[Jennifer Heise]

Ladies & Gents,

Am I alone in noticing that U.S. government created archives at the
Smithsonian and the Library of Congress have become incredibly
difficult to navigate? I recently went looking for Depression-era
materials that I know are held at both institutions and provided on
the web. I know, because it used to be relatively easy to find such
materials.  After a good deal of browsing, I finally fell back on
Googling and found a very buried page at the LOC, designed to show
teacher resources, that points to a significant number of those
resources.

Unfortunately, what I found appeared to be the bad result of sincere
librarianship. Each segment was in its own little silo, and cataloged
very specifically according to the basic ideals of cataloging. As a
result, the archetypal photo of the exhaused pea-picking migrant
worker mother can be found several ways-- but it is in no way
associated with the Depression. Materials from WPA projects are broken
up into tiny subject collections, ranges for date searching go, for
instance, from 1918-1940 or 1930-1960...  The extensive siloization of
the material really makes this very painful.

Is this the long-term fate for materials put online as part of online
archives? How do we avoid this in materials we control
-- Jenne Heise