Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources
In a previous post earlier in the year, Measuring the impact of digitised resources (12/6/2008), we announced the work that the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) was about to embark upon of identifying use and usage patterns of five JISC-funded online resources and devising meaningful metrics for the measurement of the impact of digitised scholarly resources.
This is a crucial tool for those interested in digitisation, providing much needed evidence and analysis of how digital resources are actually making a difference
At a recent JISC Digitisation programme meeting, Eric T Meyer and Katherine Eccles provided some background on how the OII is planning to carry out the work and the mixture of quantitative and qualitative measures they will take into consideration to gain some understanding of the use of such resources.
Quantitative Measures include:
• Webometrics
• Analytics
• Log file analysis
• Scientometrics / bibliometrics
• Content analysis of media coverage
Qualitative Measures include:
• Stakeholder interviews
• Resource surveys
• User feedback analysis
• Focus groups
• Questionnaires
One of the interesting things that emerged from their presentation was the need not to “obsess” too much about any particular indicator at any given time (eg, no need to look at web stats every month), but to consider a range of indicators collectively at regular intervals in time, in order to identify patterns over a longer duration of time.
The work will culminate in the creation of a Toolkit for the the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources, which will be disseminated in Spring 2009.
Presentation (PDF) on the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources.
Yesterdays’s Headlines …. Televised News Online
NewsFilm Online, launched last week, contains 60,000 digitised clips from the archives of ITN and other news sources.
It’s an incredibly rich resource, featuring news stories relating to events such as the Suez crisis in 1956, Nelson Mandela’s first interview in 1961, the moon landing in 1969 and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.
For the moment, it’s fun just exploring some of the content that is there.
But it will be interesting to see how the resources get used in the educational community.
Video has not had a great take up in teaching and learning - is this because of the content, or because of the medium? How NewsFilm Online is used will give us much more evidence in this area.
(Note the videos can only be accessed by those in UK university and college sector.)
Will a BBC video archive swamp everything else?
Various events earlier in the summer gave the BBC the chance to parade their plans to digitise their entire back archive of televisual material. (Although it’s interesting to note there is little info on this on the BBC site itself, particularly on its archive pages).
The plans are not new. Back in 2006, there were reports about this as well.
As often happens when the BBC gets involved, other providers are might be a little nervous about the effect of this.
With the power of the BBC brand and its related marketing strength, and the undoubted brilliance of technologies like the iPlayer, does this not mean that all users, irrespective of background, go straight to the BBC for their video content, rendering the offerings of other content providers somewhat useless?
Other content providers, such as JISC-funded projects like Newsfilm Online or InView will certainly have to work harder at persuading users to visit their site. However, compelling reasons do exist for getting those users to come.
- Comparative video - for instance, InView (due to launch in Spring 2009) is providing comparative videos, which allow users to see how different media outlets have covered the same historical event - something the BBC obviously cannot do by itself.
- Unique content- Newsfilm Online (the full version of which is due to launched on October 3 2008) will have content simply unavailable to the BBC. To choose at random - news items relating to Bird Flu, the Twin Towers attack or, from early Gaumont Screen reels, highlights from England Australia cricket matches, and also film rushes which never made it to the TV screen.
- NewsFilm Online will also provide a different editorial viewpoint, delivering content from media sources such as ITN and Reteurs, rather than the Beeb.
- Both the JISC-funded projects will be making their content freely available to the HE and FE communities, not just for streaming but to download, remix and re-edit. The flexibility to allow users to do what they want with such video clips is vital if users are to exploit the resources in as many ways as possible.
- It’s also worth remembering that the BBC, however impartial, sees the world via a British lens. Perspectives from other countries are supplied by digitisation projects by the National Archives in the United States, or various national bodies in the Netherlands, France or Norway.
- Additionally, the BBC is more news-focussed, and, although the BBC seems to represent a huge mass of content, it is only a drop in the ocean of what could be digitised and made available online.
- So for example, the Performance Shakespeare collection, which is part of Film and Sound Online and the Arts on Film Archive can focus on performing arts content not readily available from the BBC archives.
So that all goes to show there are plenty of reasons for users to work with video content beyond that made available via the BBC (which it should not be forgotten is only talking about these plans for digitisation at the moment).
But other content providers need to have focussed marketing and communications plans to ensure users are aware of this.
Communities and online collections
The Great War Archive web site, part of the JISC-funded First World War Poetry Digital Archive project, is a powerful example of how communities can be galvanised in the creation of a unique and poignant online resource for the benefit of the wider public.
An article on the Times Higher Education Supplement “From no man’s land to a people’s memorial” reported on how thousands of people contributed their “digital memories” of WW1 to the web site by uploading their own scans of items such as diary extracts, images and even matchboxes.
Although the submission period has now closed, people can still upload their material on the project’s Flickr group, details of which are on the Great War Archive web site.
In a podcast recorded earlier this year, before the launch of the Great War Archive, Kate Lindsay, Project Manager for the First World War Poetry Digital Archive discusses this exciting development, along with the other unique features of the collection.
Requirements for digitised resources in Islamic Studies
Following the designation of Islamic Studies as a strategically important subject by the UK Government in June 2007, JISC commissioned a review of user requirements for digitised resources for researchers and teachers within higher education working in the field of Islamic Studies.
The University of Exeter carried out the study and in their final report made a range of recommendations:
• The creation of a authoritative gateway to Islamic Resources
• Develop digitised catalogues of Islamic manuscripts and related research material such as recent theses;
• The commissioning of a feasibility study into the creation of a corpus of interactive online education materials, which could also be hosted by the national gateway
• Continuation, and increase, of the subsidies for major online reference works in Islamic Studies.
• The archiving of the websites of UK Islamic organisations
• Subsidising the acquisition of an online collection of research monographs in Islamic Studies, should such a collection be developed by a commercial organisation.
Read the full report on User Requirements for Digitised Resources in Islamic Studies (Word) or (PDF).
Is academia ready for Web 2.0?
As part of its development, the Pre-Raphaelite Resource digitisation project recently commissioned an audience research study to consult users about whether the inclusion of Web 2.0 features on a resource of this type would be useful or important to the education community. The report indicated that:
“there is some readiness among the education community for Web 2.0 technologies but only in the context of academia as a status-conscious, competitive environment. Whilst there are clear benefits to be achieved from providing teachers and students with the opportunity to share ideas in the context of stimulus artefacts, many hold reservations about ‘giving away’ their intellectual property.”
Some interesting points to note:
• Social networking features are perceived by both HE students and lecturers as primarily for pleasure rather than for work, although for younger students, the boundaries between work and life are increasingly blurred
• Content is still king: to be a truly useful research tool, students and lecturers need to know that a resource has been created for them and has scholarly merit, and reliable and relevant content
• Wikipedia was singled out by both FE and HE interviewees as being particularly unreliable, and yet highly popular;
• The features most associated with a Web 2.0 approach (rate, comment, upload, blog and send to friend) were commonly described with reference to social networking or e-commerce sites and were largely considered non-academic and therefore inappropriate for the Pre-Raphaelite online resource.
The study was carried out by Illumina Digital.
Read the Pre-Raphaelite Resource project: Audience Research Report;
Appendix 1; Appendix 2; Appendix 3; Appendix 4; Appendix 5
Prioritising Digitisation
One of the most difficult aspects of developing a digitisation strategy is deciding how you will prioritise your digitisation work
Fragile manuscripts, fading newspapers, valuable coins, hidden audio recordings, historical texts and the like all clamour for the right to be digitised first.
The JISC Digitisation Programme recognises this is a difficulty and therefore issued an ITT, along with the Research Information Network, to look into the matter: PRIORITISING DIGITISATION: ESTABLISHING USERS’ NEEDS FOR DIGITISED CONTENT IN UK HE INSTITUTIONS.
Invitations are now invited for proposals.
The aims of the study are
- identify priority collections for potential digitisation housed within UK HE’s libraries, archives, museums as well as faculties and departments
- assess users’ needs and demand for special collections to be digitised across all disciplines, including the life and physical sciences as well as the arts, humanities and social sciences
- produce a synthesis of available knowledge about users’ needs with regard to usability and format of digitised resources
- provide recommendations for a strategic approach to digitisation within the wider context and activity of leading players both in the public and commercial sector
Promoting online special collections
A recent blog post on Digitization 101 pointed to the article Online Digital Special Collections in English Universities: Promoting Awareness.
This article is a useful read for those involved in the creation of digital collections and responsible for their take-up once material is available online.
The author proposes a number of practical tips on activities and opportunities that can be exploited to raise awareness of an institution’s own digital special collections focusing on specific areas such as:
- making promotion important
- gaining more ‘power’ within own institution
- opportunities
- raising awareness
- contextual and promotional information
- targeting audiences
- access and use
Although projects involved in digitisation activity might have already thought, at some point or another during their project, of similar ways of engaging with their audiences, it’s useful to bring it all together as in here.
The template provided by the author can also be used as a basis on which to build a digitisation project’s Marketing and Communication strategy.
Creating Keywords Automatically
There’s an awful lot of interesting ideas to unpack in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse) resource mentioned in a previous posting.
For a start, there is novel to addition to showing results by showing the image reproduction for a search results as well as the OCR’d transcription.
There’s the whole range of partners involved in such a website, indicative of who needs to be involved to run an ambitious digitisation project.
And the related conference brought up a whole host of intellectual questions related to integrating the work into scholarly research.
But what is most interesting is the project’s attempts to automatically give subject keywords to articles within their resource by using natural language processing.
Each article in their website has been processed in two ways. Firstly, to extract persons, places, institutions from the complete data; and secondly to create subject terms (e.g. Arts & Crafts or Emotional Actions, States & Processes ) which relate to each of the digitised articles in the collection.
This is handy for users because it bypasses the tyranny of having to use precise search terms to discover particular articles; and it’s useful for the digitiser because they do not have to go through each article individually and make manual decisions about the subject there within.
I’m not sure it completely works as yet (there are some faults in the results and the interface is not intuitive), but this is a brave and valuable step in trying to really exploit the richness of digitised resources, a richness we have not really tapped into yet.
Nineteenth-Century resources - Evolution or Revolution?
Members of the JISC team attended a conference to launch the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse): a free, online edition of six nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers.
The conference was interesting for a number of reasons, not least because it is in a excellent model for getting groups of end-users involved in discussing and using such resources and actually thinking about the effects they have on their research area, in this case nineteenth-century print.
Patrick Leary, from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing, spoke about the ‘profound changes in the scholarly economy’ that the recent publication of digital resources related to the nineteenth century caused. What, he and others asked, will research look like in five years time.
Others wondered if such changes would be revolutionary or ‘merely’ a huge evolution? There was some gentle disagreement as to whether there should be a push to explore new methodologies (i.e. revolution), or whether we would should make sure that all academics can at least exploit the basics of utilising such resources (the evolution).
In any case, it is apparent that we are really still scratching the surface when it comes to answering these questions.
