CuRL is an interesting experiment to build one section of an academic Yahoo. A joint program among Wesleyan, Connecticut College, Trinity College, Dartmouth, and Williams, faculty, IT staff and librarians collaborate to develop a library of scholarly links for the disciplines of environmental studies and the political novel.

Faculty identify worthwhile links, providing a detailed rationale and critical analysis in addition to the URL itself. Librarians then check the site, standardize the descriptive information, and catalog the site using standard keywords. The IT staff developed the underlying database, and run periodic scans to assure that the site remains accessible as well as working with faculty to develop specialized views of the database for specific courses.

CuRL is different from other online directories because it seeks to identify only the high quality sites and to provide other scholars with critical analysis about the contents of each site. Similarly, they regularly scan to assure that the sites are regularly accessible and have not radically changed their contents. CuRL is also a good example of cooperation among faculty, librarians, and technologists.

CuRL limits itself to two disciplines, but it could readily be scaled upward to multiple disciplines with different colleges taking the lead responsibility for each one.

Here's a conference presentation by Michael Roy that describes the project.