Want Google to get interested in digitising your collection?
Google have a form you can fill in.
It’s as simple as that – definitely more straightforward than a JISC proposal (!)
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Art on Google Earth – Good but not good enough
There has been plenty of publicity about the eye-wateringly beautiful digital images produced by Madrid’s Prado museum in association with Google Earth.
Detail from Rubens’ The Three Graces, Prado Museum, Madrid. Taken from Google Earth.
Contrary to what some art critics have written, this is, in some ways, a more powerful experience than seeing the original, where glass, ropes and bollards block such an intense close-up experience.
However, like Google’s project to recreate classical Rome, such resources are great for the general public they are not quite good enough for a university audience.
A researcher or lecturer certainly wants high-quality images, but they also want
- the ability to easily download and manipulate the image
- related tools that can comapre and contrast images
- a stable URL to cite the digital address of the image
- good quality information about the painting (i.e. catalogue / metadata stuff)
- to be able to search all paintings in the Prado (in fact the whole world) – not just the highlights!
- clear copyright terms and conditions about using.
Do that for us Google and we will be very happy.
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Digitisation and Search Engine Optimisation
Improving your online presence is an essential component of any digitsation project; without visitors to your site there is little point having the material digitised and available online.
Much of the web’s curent usability is dependent upon the effectiveness and effeciency of web crawlers, most prominent among these is, of course, the Google bot. The question for digitisation projects with little or no marketing budget is how to maximise your online presence to allow web crawlers access to your data. How can small scale projects organically grow their presence so that they are able to achieve that holy grail of a Google ranking?
Alastair Dunning produced a presentation on being a good data provider which offers an excellent introduction into this area.
To compliment the presentation I have compiled some key areas that should be addressed when you are considering your online presence, and how web crawlers can index even the ‘deep’ areas of your pages and data:
- Keywords : What’s your key content and messages? Compare your key words with Google AdWords, and their trends
- Monitoring Performance and Reputation: Check what noise your site is creating, and whether you are successfully attracting visitors. Tols such as: Google Analytics, Technorati, Google Alerts can be used to track your reputation and performance.
- URLs : Make sure URLs are stable. Also pay attention to your Title Tags, ensuring you include key words, your ‘brand’, and any themes.
- Sitemap : Google Sitemap - allows you to create an XML file containing all the URLs on your (public) web pages along with relevant information. Sitemaps are particularly useful for Database and Dynamic content.
- Website Architecture : Aim for fast response times, use CSS, create 404 error pages, bread crumb navigation.
- Images : Have a meaningful landing page, title attributes, file name with key words, social tagging, comments, and, enable Google Image Search!
- Build Links : Think about the groups and websites you would like to link to you, and contact them.
- Be (very) Sociable : Social media (Facebook, Second Life, YouTube, Twitter, Google Groups…), Share content (RSS, bookmarking…), Contribute (Blogger, Wiki, Twitter, Yahoo Answers…), Images and Video (Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Picasa).
This is just a brief overview of some of the key areas you will want to think about to enhance your sites visibility, useability, and ultimately the experience that your user has in both finding and using your site and its contents.
The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) in conjunction with the JISC’s Strategic Content Alliance recently ran a three day workshop looking at how you can improve your online presence simply and inexpensively. Many of the points raised in this article were developed and discussed in the workshop, and applied directly to cultural heritage institutions. Due to the overwhelming success of the course it is hoped that another workshop will be arranged in the next few months, further information will be made available on this blog, and the Strategic Content Alliance’s blog.
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Millions more newspapers pages to be available on Google
Today Google announced that they are launching:
“an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.”
This adds to the large amount of existing online newspaper content, by publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, that is already being crawled by Google.
In addition, Google has entered a partnership with ProQuest and Heritage that will allow even more newspapers pages to be digitised and made available online. As the ProQuest press-release explains:
“ProQuest will contribute content to the partnership, and will introduce newspaper publishers nationwide to the program. ProQuest will also supply from its microfilm vault newspaper content that can be delivered effectively in the less formal framework of the open web.”
Newspapers content will be available through Google News Archive Search:
“Search results include content from a number of sources, including both partner content digitized by Google through our News Archive Partner Program and online archival materials that we’ve crawled. Search results can include content that is freely accessible as well as content that requires a fee. Articles related to a single story within a given time period are grouped together to allow users to see a broad perspective on the topics they are searching. “
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Librarians on the way out?
The JISC and BL-commissioned Google Generation report highlights a number of key points that will have an effect on current and future digitisation projects.
- That librarians need to radically re-think their position and tasks to avoid becoming outdated in the face of tools like Google.
- It is not just the ‘kids of today’ that dumb down in front of a computer terminal – we all skim over the surface of the web’s voluminous content
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The now-ingrained hyperactive approach to skimming Internet content means that any kind of barrier to access (payment or passwords for instance) means sacrificing the attention of many potential users
It’s worth reading.
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Podcast: Why is Google showing us the way forward in digitisation? asks senior UK librarian
The recent LIBER-EBLIDA workshop on digitisation of library material in Europe explored some important challenges facing national and university libraries across the continent as they attempt to join together to deliver a “European Digital Library”.
In this podcast interview Paul Ayris, librarian at University College London and a senior figure in these European developments, depicts a fragmented European digitisation landscape and calls for more strategic pan-European vision and leadership. He asks a number of challenging questions of the library community, including how the role of libraries has to be re-thought not just as custodians of collections but also as learning and social spaces.
Ayris points out how Google has changed the way people think of, access and use resources, and libraries can learn from more direct and innovative models of introducing change.
In the UK, JISC is providing an infrastructure and leadership in funding digitisation projects and encouraging collaborations.
A look through the currently funded JISC digitisation projects will reveal how these collections differ from the type of digitisation Google is doing, by focusing on special collections with a variety of different formats and types of material, spanning centuries, and with a high degree of curatorial input.
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The importance of media literacy
Members of the JISC Digitisation Programme attended the Educa Online e-learning conference in Berlin at the end of November 2007.
Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, was one of the key speakers at the conference. He made an impassioned attack on what he saw as the anarchic, non-professional nature of Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, My Space and other Web2.0 services.
To Keen, relying on computer algorithms or permitting any users instant ability to upload content was destroying years of accumulated wisdom garnered through peer-review, editorial control and authorial responsibility.
Many of the Keen’s statements were rather polemical, and suggested throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
However, discussion of the issues at the conference reinforced the idea that the important thing is not to try and ignore such Web2.0 services but put media literacy at the top of the Internet and e-learning agenda. This way users will be able to distinguish a trusted website from a second-rate one, and better manipulate services such as Google and Wikipedia.
A further point to consider was that this issues should not just revolve around information technology literacy but a broader media literacy. Knowledge arrives from many different media – newspapers, television as well as the Internet and plenty others – and so to gain a proper understanding of knowledge, these media need to be considered together rather than separately.