“Did Bob’s Pills cure gout?”
If we make it, they might come… but it is a fact that any newly launched digital collection has to compete for attention with a huge amount of material already available on the web. Resource creators, therefore, have the challenging task of devising ways in which to interest and engage potential users.
Projects within the JISC digitisation programme recently attended a workshop which focused on how best to engage users with digital resources, the challenges this poses but also the many possibilities offered by online collections to be exploited in an interdisciplinary way.
Workshop leaders presented a framework for e-learning engagement, the Digital Artefacts for Learner engagement (DiAL-e Framework), that provides guidance on different approaches, or learning designs, that one can adopt to engage users with the resources.
Part of the workshop also explored, through group work, the value of working across collections in an interdisciplinary way. Groups made up of representatives of different digitisation projects were assigned the task to devise a question for students that would allow them to research a topic by consulting material available from their different collections.
One group, made up by staff from the John Johnson collection of Electronic Ephemera, British Newspapers and 19th Century Pamphlets projects, came up with the fictitious question, “Did Bob’s Pills cure gout?”.
As the group spokesperson explained, “only by searching to and fro between all three of the resources represented by our group, could a user discover the real story of ‘Bob’s Pills’ - the early promise (advertising testimonials - ‘Miraculous!’), the scandal (newspaper reports of nasty side effects) and the dodgy methods employed by its powerful parent company ‘Robert’s Medicines’ to try and retain its credibility (using editorial clout to influence debate in medical pamphlets).”
Finding the right answer was not the primary aim of the exercise, but far more important was the interesting journey of discovery that this process led to.
The Murder of Jean Alexander (Kilmarnock, 1807)
One of the great things about digitising multiple collections is it allows you to build connections between different resources. Here’s a straightforward example
The John Johnson Collection of Electronic Ephemera has a news-sheet (dated 14 Nov 1807) recounting the murder of two women in the town of Kilmarnock, on the west coast of Scotland. It calls this a “shocking murder and robbery” a “deed of darkness“.
By 19th November 1807, the news had wound its way to London, where it found itself in the Morning Chronicle (part of the British Library newspaper digitisation)
The editor of Morning Chronicle had probably been sent the Edinburgh news-sheet. Several of the phrases that appear in the earlier news-sheet (e.g “every possible exertion used to discover and apprehend them“) appear almost replicated in the newspaper)
In the news: Darwin Online project
The Guardian reports today that about 90,000 pages of manuscripts, field notes, photographs and sketches connected with Charles Darwin are being placed online, where they can be viewed free. The material is the last major set of additions to the Darwin Online project, started in 2002 and based in Cambridge, and which claims to be the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue created.
According to the Guardian,
One set of pages that is likely to attract considerable interest is Darwin’s scrawled first draft of his theory of evolution from 1842. The scribbled argument is crammed with afterthoughts, footnotes and crossed-out text. A transcript of the text has been published previously, but few will have seen the original facsimile of Darwin’s unpolished thought process.
Public libraries digitising music
During a recent meeting on digitisation in the EU, the JISC Digitisation Programme came across this interesting digitisation model from the Rotterdam Central Record Library
- The library in Rotterdam owns 300,000 CDs (including mainstream stuff)
- They are digitising every CD
- CDs are then lent digitally, ie via Internet, to library users (for free)
- Users can use the tracks for a limited period before DRM kicks in and blocks use
- Publishers were initially suspicious but have been won over because users are now getting access to stuff that they never knew of before - and then they buy it if they like it
Public-private partnership delivers thousands of images for free
Thanks to a public-private partnership between the Bodleian Library and ProQuest, thousands of images from one of the world’s most important collections of printed ephemera are being made freely available to all UK universities, further education institutions, schools and public libraries.
The John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera, part of the JISC Phase Two Digitisation Programme, is now available at http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.co.uk and http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.com.
This first release comprises more than 6,300 images, drawn from the five key areas that will eventually be covered in the final collection for a total of about 150,000 images, including theatrical ephemera from the 19th Century Entertainment category, the Booktrade, Popular Prints, Advertising and material on Crimes, Murders and Executions.
The web site provides information on how to access the collection through your institution or public library.
Open up as many channels as possible for resource discovery
There’s a lot of digital content out there, and so the battle to get your particular project noticed and used is a tough one.
One particular project that has dealt with this is the Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets project, a multi-partner project led by the University of Southampton. The resource will not just have its own website but numerous means of access.
* The principal content will be delivered via JSTOR
* Metadata on individual pamphlets held by each partner institution will be held in the respective University Library catalogues, with links to the items on JSTOR
* COPAC - The merged online catalogue for major UK research libraries will hold the metadata for each digitised pamphlet, again with links
* Google Search - Metadata will be uploaded to Google for incorporation into the search engine
So even if a user does not directly visit the full resource on JSTOR, there are numerous other doors by which they may gain entrance to the resource