Digital Impacts – last few places left
There are still a few places left for the event Digital Impacts: How to Measure and Understand the Usage and Impact of Digital Content, 20 May, Oxford
Digital Impacts will discuss methodologies for measuring the impact of digitised resources and embedding them in teaching and research; it will present projects from the JISC-funded Impact and embedding programme, which provide cases studies on the impact of resources as wide ranging as institutional podcasts, multimedia dance resources, historical sources and learning resources repositories and will lanuch the newly updated Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources.
Speakers include Brian Kelly, UKOLN, Prof David Robey, Oxford eResearch Centre (OeRC), Melissa Heighton, Oxford University Computing Services, Dr Jane Winters, Head of Publications, Institute of Historical Research, representatives from the projects, and the workshop convenors, Dr Kathryn Eccles and Dr Eric T Meyer, both from the Oxford Internet Institute.
More information about the event, a draft programme and registration form are available on the Digital Impacts web site.
Scholars and digital resources – an unconference
One of the findings from the measuring impact study was the importance of not relying on quantitative statistics. Seductive as they are, the array of numbers from a Google Analytics report do not tell the whole story.
Considered feedback, review and criticism direct from the intended users are just, as if not more, important.
However getting such qualitative commentary can be difficult. Focus groups and the like take time and effort to set up.
This is why it us encouraging to see an entire conference being organised on the relationship of a digital resource to the schoilarly work it is encouraging.
The London Lives ‘unconference’ is inviting contributions from anyone whose research will benefit from use of the London Lives website- an enhanced resource that will will provide access to primary sources containing 240,000 pages of manuscripts sources, and 3.2 million names, reflecting the history of eighteenth-century London.
The event takes place in July 2010 and further details are available on the conference website. The London Lives resource itself will be available in March 2010
You can now measure the impact of your online resource
The Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR), developed for JISC by the Oxford Internet Institute, is now available online for everybody to use.
If you have been struggling with making sense of hits, visitors numbers, log analysis, users feedback, wondering how to interpret all this data, how to gather it in the first place and how to assess whether your resource is being used and how, the toolkit will provide a clear, concise and easy to use framework for carrying out an assessment of the impact an online resource is having.
As the toolkit web site emphasises:
There are a number of challenges in assessing the use and impact of online digital resources: these include new methods, shifts in the way that people access resources, new audiences, and new forms of information-seeking behaviour among different audiences.
The evaluation of online scholarship is a moving target, and therefore a flexible set of measures and practices will be used. The toolkit consists not of a single software solution, but a set of recommendations for best practices.
The toolkit inlcudes useful information, related articles, tools and guidance on how to use a range of quantitative and qualitatives measures (including webometrics, analytics, content analysis of media coverage, focus groups, resource surveys, user feedback analysis and more) and is open for submission of additional relevant resources, or comments, by the community.
The toolkit was piloted through case studies of five diverse JISC Digitisation projects funded under Phase 1 of the Digitisation programme.
Eighteenth-Century Resources Online – Scholarly Opinions
JISC, along with publishers ProQuest, Cengage and Adam Matthews Digital, were involved in a couple of round table sessions at the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference at Oxford University.
The sessions were designed to get feedback from the scholarly community on resources such as ECCOand the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera
The presentation given by Alastair Dunning of JISC is included here. Below that are some of the key points made by the academics present, and there is a longer pdf document to download with extended notes, which also includes some of the key resources in the area.
Key Feedback from the Roundtable Sessions
- Repeated call for standardised interfaces – “Every car I drive may be different, but I still know how to drive it without thinking. Why should it not be the same for website interfaces?”. There was also strong support for an eighteenth-century portal.
- Digitisation taken for granted – The advantages of having digital editions online (“you can work without putting your socks on”) are so obvious that there is little need to argue for them
- We need to know what’s there – “Does EEBO really contain every early English book? Or are there gaps that are not obvious to researchers and undergraduates?”
- How do we stop the digital divide – “Scholars from less wealthy institutions should not be isolated because their library cannot afford the subscription cost”
Download the full feedback from the session – 18th-century-resources-feedback-jan-2009.pdf
Evaluation, Evaluation, Evaluation
Evaluation is often a neglected area within a digitisation project’s life cycle, as most of a team’s energies and resources get absorbed by the complex task of setting up the right infrastructure to carry out the actual digitisation of material. At times subsumed within the more technical Quality Assurance process, at best it’s the kind of activity that comes as an after-thought towards the end of a project.
Within the current JISC digitisation programme, and at the request of many of the 16 projects taking part, we’ve tackled the issue of evaluation from very early on.
Last September JISC ran an evaluation workshop for all projects which provided guidance on a methodological framework for evaluation based on the booklet Six Steps to Effective Evaluation: A Handbook for Programme and Project Managers, developed for JISC by Glenaffric Ltd, who also led the workshop.