Search Engine Optimisation
One of the key ways of getting exposure to your website is by ensuring that search engines such as Google have successfully harvested your content, and added information on your site to their indices.
Whilst some of the tasks that facilitate this can be quite tricky, it is surprising that many digital projects still fail to take advantage of many simple ways in which ’search engine optimisation’ can take place.
The Strategic Content Alliance therefore commissioned a Canadian team to come up with some recommendations for implementing search engine optimisation, and I would urge any digitial project to look through it, and think about implementing the suggested guidance.
The pdf is available to download from
http://sca.jiscinvolve.org/files/2010/01/sca_chin_seo_report_v1-02.pdf
Exporting metadata to portals
As an addition to its successful Freeze Frame digitisation project, JISC asked the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute to explore what was needed to export their collection of 20,000 digitised images to portals such as Europeana and Flickr, as well as to commerical image providers.
The request led the Institute to a full-scale overhaul of they managed and exported their images, and the report on the JISC website provides plenty of useful detail on their thinking behind the change, plus some recommendations for others in similar circumstances.
Some of the key findings from the full report (pdf file) are :
- Metadata is often created in the context of a single, localised website rather than for re-use on other sites.
- Creating shareable metadata needs much greater attention to keywords, credits and rights.
- Institutions that are serious about exporting their content need to build rigourous image management processes to avoid data export becoming a laborious manual task.
- Development of such systems can then also help provide sophisticated management of internal processes.
- Personnel and structures at the portals often change making it difficult for content providers to build working partnerships.
- Evaluating the success of exporting metadata or content to others’ portals is a particularly tricky business.
JorumOpen
The recent launch of JorumOpen sees free access to a growing collection of open educational resources.
JorumOpen will allow lecturers and teachers to share materials under the Creative Commons licence framework. This will allow for easier sharing, grants users greater rights for use and re-use of online content and is easier to understand.
Jorum has also developed a range of Youtube videos on using JorumOpen.
For digitisation projects this is an ideal place to both deposit any educational resources you may have developed as outputs for your project, and also offers a unique resource for uncovering and reusing new resources.
Europeana - UK Conference 26th June
Do you have your collection on-line? Do you want it to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible?
If you answer ‘Yes’ to either of these questions then having your collection accessible through the flagship European portal is something you should seriously consider.
However you might not have heard of Europeana or have only just heard the name?
Therefore Collections Trust has organised a free to attend Conference for you to find out more. Here are some details:
It will take place on Friday the 26th June at the Commonwealth Club, near Trafalgar Square.
It starts at 10am and finishes at around 4pm.
Outline of the day:
Morning - Europeana Context:
* Keynote speech (to be confirmed);
* Funding in a European context (Neil Sandford);
* Europeana - What it is, why it is important and developments (from the Director of Europeana, Jill Cousins and Go Sugimoto);
* Introduction to Europeana Group projects (from various Europeana group project partners in the UK).
Lunch
Afternoon - UK Opportunities:
* Examples of best practice (e.g. British Museum);
* Role of Collections Trust (Nick Poole, CEO);
* Round table (The way ahead in the UK).
Hope this wets the appetite!
If you want to attend then please e-mail Eleanor Lovegrove eleanor@collectionstrust.org.uk
Using maps to find digital stuff
The Archival Sounds Recordings website had recently introduced a new facility to allow users to explore their digitised sounds via maps.
Instead of relying on browsing or searching via keyword, users can now click on the customised Google Map, which reveals sound recordings related to a particular place. This is particularly useful for collections that have a broad range of sources, such as soundscapes, accents or natural history recordings.
The work is part of a larger project JISC has funded to make digitised content searchable via geographic means. Involving EDINA, the University of Edinburgh, and three digitisation projects, the project is evaluating and testing what works and what doesn’t when you identify and then visualise geographical place names form large textual data sets.
More details on the project are available from the JISC website.
What does opening up your data really mean?
There’s plenty of discussion about things like APIs (application programming interfaces) and concepts of opening up data, but to the non-initiated this can all seem rather confusing and overly technical.
However, as those who have created digital projects continue to look for new ways to expose their content to the widest possible audience, APIs offer a way to give access to whole of your collection so that others can come up with new ways of exploiting it. Often, it’s people outside your organisation who can come up with imaginative ways of using your content in ways you had never imagined.
This could include other parties
- using your subject metadata to build a harvesting search engine over a number of collections related to a specific theme
- using all your metadata related to dates and time to build a timeline
- analysing your descriptive metadata to build a tag cloud
And once an API is set up, you spend a lot less time responding to queries from people who wonder if they can hold of your data for their own projects. They just go straight to the interface and question the data they need. They then build interfaces around this data, that will drive more users to your website.
There are two really helpful blog articles that help describe this better.
- Mike Ellis’ interview with the Brooklyn Museum, who have just published their API
- The interview with the DigitalNZ (New Zealand) team, who have done some radically innovative ideas in how to get their nation’s content used.
(Thanks to Mag3737 for the Flickr photo)
New archival collections available from JISC Collections
JISC Collections is making two new archival collections freely available to universities, colleges and research councils:
The British Periodicals Collections I and II: Traces the development and growth of the periodical press in Britain from its origins in the seventeenth century through to the Victorian “age of periodicals” and beyond. The collections comprise six million keyword-searchable pages and forms an essential record of more than two centuries of British history and culture.
The Burney Collection: Represents the largest single collection of 17th and 18th century English news media available from the British Library. The collection includes nearly 1 million pages from more than 1000 pamphlets and newspapers from the period, including the first successful London daily and first illustrated newspaper all dating from 1600-1800.
Together these archives would cost individual institutions between £50,000 and £90,000 to purchase, but these agreements make them available freely until at least the end of 2013, and have been licensed on behalf of the UK academic community in perpetuity.
The British Library is currently digitising another one million newspaper pages as part of the JISC programme British Newspapers 1620-1900 . These are expected to be realised in the spring 2009.
Make sure collection names are obvious
The British Library’s Sound Archive has some fascinating collections but they tend to have some quite obscure names.
For example, the St Mary-le-Bow public debates have contributions from Iris Murdoch, Peter Cook and Enoch Powell.
A previous version of the Sound Archive website replicated these collection names - and quite possibly put off users who failed to understand what may actually have been in each collection.
However, a new browsing structure has now been created.
It is much more obvious - collections are organised organised according to subject name giving users a more immediate understanding of what might be available.
Portal for European heritage available online (sort of)
The European Union’s Europeana portal project was launched yesterday, offering user access to a wealth of cultural heritage content, harvested from the continent’s museums, archives and libraries.
There has been some scepticism about the long-term success of the project, especially in regards to its sustainability model and it’s ability to deflect users away from Google - a problem for any budding portal.
However, two recent events might changes the sceptics’ views.
Firstly, is the overwhelming popularity of the site on its first day - 10m hits, according to the website, with the unpleasant side effect that the site will be down until mid-December.
Recent comments from Google suggest they might be interested on working with Europeana, a partnership that would definelty add to the portal’s impact. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
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