The Virtual Mesoamerican Archive has chosen the materials included herein based first upon the quality and appropriate nature of the content -- whether the materials will help advance serious studies of Mesoamerica, 1800 B.C.E. to 1800 C.E., with greatest attention to the lives and cultural evolution of indigenous peoples. We have also selected materials based to some extent upon availability. Digital images of museum pieces, for instance, are more readily available than manuscript facsimiles from libraries. It is our intention to promote the digitization of manuscripts and increase this proportion of content in the VMA over time. Finally, another major consideration has been the willingness of the owners and hosts to grant us permission to include their materials here. We have actually met with almost no resistance from any library, museum, or individual, but the permissions-seeking process is an arduous and time-consuming one. When potential contributors begin approaching us, we will create a way to streamline the submission and editorial review process, and we should be able to expand the content included here more quickly.

The VMA seeks serious, quality research materials for inclusion in this portal site. If you have or know of a site with materials of a high standard, please bring this to our attention (swood@uoregon.edu). When we harvest images, we will resize them if necessary so that they have no greater height or width than four inches. We expect users to go to the original image if they are looking for a larger size (although this is not always available). We would also welcome that larger, higher quality images be donated to us for storage in our databases, so that teachers seeking a larger size for including in an electronic slide show, for example, or scholars wishing to get a magnified view what will advance their research, could be accommodated.

When we harvest metadata, we cut and paste, trying to capture the most accurate and scholarly material about a given image offered on the original site. Because we import it without alteration (except for the occasional omission of data that seems unrelated to the image), we all must rely on the composer of the original sites for accuracy. If a question arises about the meaning of any of the metadata, we urge our users to visit the original site and query the appropriate webmaster.

In the future, we would like to establish a board that would create metadata standards to which all participating repositories might comply and which future sites might incorporate as they are constructed. Encoding of sites would also be desirable in order to facilitate a more mechanized harvesting method in the future. We are members of Text Encoding Initiative and support the Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standard of the Library of Congress.