engaging your community through cultural heritage digital libraries

Supporting Digital Scholarship: Engaging Your Community Through Cultural Heritage

Digital Libraries

ALA TechSource Workshop

Karen Calhoun

Aaron Brenner

October 8, 20141

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Calhoun, Karen. Exploring Digital

Libraries: Foundations,

Practice, Prospects. Chicago:

ALA Neal-Schuman, 2014.

Chapter 7 “Digital libraries and

their communities”

Chapter 10 “Digital libraries and

the social web: collections and

platforms”

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Learning objectives

• Consider the context in which digital libraries are

discovered locally, regionally and globally

• Be acquainted with some ideas for examining your

assumptions about your audiences and their needs

• Evaluate some ways to increase the “social life” of

your cultural heritage digital collections

• Become familiar with some examples of crowdsourcing

in cultural heritage digital libraries

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Poll:

Are you responsible for managing, or helping to

manage a digital library?

Yes – cultural heritage digital library

Yes - subject-based or institutional repository

Yes – other

Yes – several of the above

No

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Two Main IssuesVisibility and reach (discoverability)

• “Unlearn” some core

assumptions (DLs as

destination sites)

• Understand the

context in which

digital libraries are

discovered locally,

regionally and globally 

“Social life” of digital

libraries

• The web as a platform

for participation

• Changing community

expectations

• From collections to

platforms

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Getting Attention on the Web

“You Are What You Link”Source: Adamic and Adar 2001

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Discoverability: Integrated and Decentralized

Integrated discoverability

• “The Libraries will need a [pre-indexed] system or

service layer that integrates metadata from

internal, external, owned, licensed, and freely-

available data sources selected by library staff”

(Hanson et al. 2011)

Decentralized discoverability“The Libraries should generate … metadata for local collections and data sources

that can be exported, harvested, or made available for crawling by

external systems.” (Hanson et al. 2011)

An Example of Best Practice (you are what you link)!

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IntegratedDiscovery

Content from

Creators and Their

Agents

Local Catalog Local Digital Libraries

Locally managed

resources Feeds from

other sources (fee or free)

Local discovery

layer

Decentralized Discoverability

Uploaded/harvested/crawled/indexed metadata

& links

Library cooperative commons

services and registries

ArchiveGridSearch engines (Google, Google

Scholar)

National, international, and

domain-specific collections and

services

National, international, and

domain-specific collections and

services

National, international, and domain-

specific collections and

services

Europeana

DPLADigital Lib.of Georgia

Pause for questions, comments

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Online Community Life Cycle

Life cycle model of success factors for digital libraries in social environmentsBased on Iriberri and Leroy (2009)Calhoun, K. (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries. p. 161.

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If a network-based service’s intended communities do not actively engage and participate, the service will (eventually) die.

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Social digital libraries?

• Most continue to operate from a traditional,

collections-centered service mode

• The social nature and roles of a library are

typically lost – DLs and repos are mostly read-only

(“web 1.0”)

• A digital library that incorporates social web

approaches continues to be the exception rather

than the rule.

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Changing Community Expectations

When individuals who use social sites and tools approach digital libraries (and repositories), they bring their social web expectations with them.

The digital libraries that continue to operate from a traditional, collections-centered service model (that is, nearly all of them) are now faced with finding their place in the fast-moving, chaotic information space of the social web.

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The web as a platform for participation

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What is the social web?• The term “social web” refers collectively to the web sites, tools and

services that facilitate interactions, collaboration, content creation

and sharing, contribution and participation on the web

• The distinguishing characteristics are human and machine-to-

machine interactions

• The social web supports many types of online communities, and not

just those who participate in social networks

• In addition to the many web services and APIs that support the social

web, the large-scale take-up of mobile smartphones, tablets and

other mobile devices has created a huge scope of opportunity for

social web growth

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Digital libraries and the social web

• The advent of the social web provides an opportunity to

shift the focus and core assumptions of digital libraries …

– Away from:

– Their collections and information processes (selecting,

organizing, providing access, etc.)

– In favor of:

– New, community-centered ways of thinking about services,

expectations and potential social roles.

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From static repositories to social platforms?

“Social platforms” are active, open, modular, gregarious and “chatty” with other software, servers, people and organizations

Dan CohenHistory scholarExec. Director, DPLA(Formerly of Center forHistory and New Media)

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What would change?

Transitions associated with the shift to social digital librariesand repositories (figure 9.1, p. 214, Exploring Digital Libraries

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What to do?Inventory columns/questions

NameSizeTarget Audiences/communities Usage (stats, webanalytics)

Rankings

Similar/related/competitor sites

Last needs assessment?

Benefits to target audiences

Communications/outreach activities

Potential for web services/social features?

What else?

Inventory of your digital collections repositories?

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Some Possibilities to Consider

• Needs assessment of your

intended audiences

• Environmental scan: look

at examples in other

organizations

• Examine your digital

library using the online

communities life cycle

model (slide 12)

• Inventory your digital

collections to identify

opportunities to make

them more social and

aligned with community

needs/practices

• Don’t do anything within

your organizational

“silo” – reach out, look

for willing partners and

pilot/demo projects

What else?

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Questions:

• In what ways have you reached out to

give a user focus to your digital library

work?

• What are challenges – social,

technical, resources, expertise – you

face in doing so?

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Platforms: more than open access, opening knowledge creation

Europeana Business Plan 2014http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/900548/f19cc4ff-56a3-422c-83d9-f156ecc9b4ca

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Characterizing crowdsourcing for cultural heritage

“[A]sking the public to

undertake meaningful

tasks … in an

environment where the

activities and/or goals

provide inherent

rewards for

participation”

- Mia Ridge

less: more:

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Enriching content:Transcription, tagging, identification

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Participatory Collection-Building

http://www.nowseethis.org/peopleshistory

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Immediate History / Memorials

http://marathon.neu.edu/http://911digitalarchive.org/

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Connecting in person:Roadshows & Collecting Days

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Engagement-First Projects: NYPL Labs

What it means

fundamentally,” Vershbow

continues, “is re-imagining the

very roles of librarians and

curators, positioning them not

only as custodians of physical

collections, but as leaders of

online communities.”http://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/09/15/all-hands-

deck-nypl-turns-crowd-develop-digital-collections

Labs doodle by Michael Lascarideshttp://www.nypl.org/collections/labs

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Beyond transcription:

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Ultimately, crowdsourcing is about far more than collecting data

Trevor Owens:

http://www.trevorowens.org/2012/03/crowdsourcing-cultural-heritage-the-objectives-are-upside-down/

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Cooper Hewitt Collections developer Sebastian Chan:

The site “puts the museum properly ‘on the Network’...

...asserts the value of even incomplete object records in the face of falling

public funding for digitization and culture in general

...communicates to the public that the museum is human and fallible, just

like them

...is aimed at both scholars and casual visitors, and increasingly machines

and robots that inhabit the web”

Getting collections on the network

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Wikipedia: for mutual benefit

http://vimeo.com/78005986

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org

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Microdata: richer representationon the Web

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Leveraging Linked Data to support communities:

multi-lingual support

Linked data for mapping communities

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http://linkedjazz.org/public_demo_mapping/

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Other strategies for engaging & socializing digital libraries:

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Chatty and unpredictable:Serendipity, bots, and applications

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Localizing views & contributions

https://www.historypin.org/map/http://inkdroid.org/ici/

Visualizing the data inside collections

http://web.stanford.edu/group/ruralwest/cgi-bin/drupal/visualizations/us_newspapers

“...[R]esearchers may want to interact with a collection of artifacts, or they may want to work with a data corpus. Some may want to search for stories in historic newspapers. Some may want to mine newspaper OCR for trends across time periods and geographic areas. Some may want to see what a specific user tweeted. Some may want to look at the spread of an event hashtag across the world in a day.”

Leslie Johnston, “Data is the New Black,” The Signal: Digital Preservation, October 14, 2011, http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2011/10/data-is-the-new-black/.

...and uses we cannot anticipate:

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Happening now: 680 other ideas

https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/libraries

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No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.Meditation XVII, John Donne

Thank You!

karencal129@gmail.comabrenner@pitt.edu

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Over to you!

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References (1/3)• Adamic, Lada A., and Eytan Adar. 2001. “You Are What You Link.” In 10th

Annual International World Wide Web Conference, Hong Kong.

http://www10.org/program/society/yawyl/YouAreWhatYouLink.htm.

• Calhoun, Karen (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries. Chicago: ALA Neal-

Schuman

• Chan, Sebastian. “Cooper-Hewitt Online Collection | MW2013: Museums

and the Web 2013.” Accessed September 25, 2014.

http://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/bow/cooper-hewitt-online-

collection/.

• Charles, Valentine, and Cécile Devarenne. “Europeana Enriches Its Data

with the Art and Architecture Thesaurus.” Europeana Professional.

http://www.pro.europeana.eu/c/portal/layout?p_l_id=1278264.

• Cohen, Dan. “The Social Life of Digital Libraries,” April 2010.

http://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/226651.

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References (2/3)

• De Jager, Wiebe. “Helping Cultural Heritage Institutions Get Their Content on Wikipedia |

Europeana,” August 6, 2014. http://blog.europeana.eu/2014/08/helping-cultural-

heritage-institutons-get-their-content-on-wikipedia/.

• Europeana Business Plan 2014. Accessed March 31, 2014.

http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/900548/f19cc4ff-56a3-422c-83d9-f156ecc9b4ca.

• Gan, Vicky. “All Hands on Deck: NYPL Turns to the Crowd to Develop Digital Collections.”

Accessed September 25, 2014. http://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/09/15/all-hands-deck-

nypl-turns-crowd-develop-digital-collections.

• Hanson, Cody, and Heather Hessel. University of Minnesota Libraries - Discoverability

Phase 2 Report, February 4, 2011. http://purl.umn.edu/99734

• “LD4L Use Cases - Linked Data for Libraries - DuraSpace Wiki.”

https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/ld4l/LD4L+Use+Cases.

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References (3/3)

• Owens, Trevor (2012) “Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage: The Objectives are Upside

Down”. http://www.trevorowens.org/2012/03/crowdsourcing-cultural-heritage-the-

objectives-are-upside-down/

• Pattuelli, M. Cristina, Matt Miller, Leanora Lange, Sean Fitzell, and Carolyn Li-Madeo.

“Crafting Linked Open Data for Cultural Heritage: Mapping and Curation Tools for the

Linked Jazz Project.” The Code4Lib Journal, no. 21 (July 15, 2013).

http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/8670.

• Proffitt, Merrilee, and Sara Snyder. “CNI: Wikipedia and Libraries: What’s the

Connection?” presented at the Coalition for Networked Information Fall 2012

Membership Meeting, December 10, 2012. http://vimeo.com/61522767.

• Ridge, Mia. “Open Objects: Sharing Is Caring Keynote ‘Enriching Cultural Heritage

Collections through a Participatory Commons.’” Accessed March 31, 2014.

http://openobjects.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/sharing-is-caring-keynote-enriching.html.