Beyond the Scanned Image: A Needs Assessment of Scholarly Users of Digital Collections

Harriett Green, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigngreen19@illinois.edu | @greenharr

Angela Courtney, Indiana University – Bloomingtonancourtn@indiana.edu | @englishlitlib

Nicki Saylor, Library of Congress American Folklife Center

Digital Humanities 2013 July 18, 2013

Digital Collections: A Bounty

Research on Use of Digital Resources in the Humanities• Council of Library and Information Resources,

Scholarly Work in the Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment

• Log Analysis of Internet Resources in the Arts and Humanities Project (LAIRAH)

• Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR)

• Research Portals in the Arts and Humanities (REPAH)

• Ithaka S+R reports• See DH2013 conference abstract for further

citations

Partner Institutions: • Australian National University• Indiana University• Northwestern University• Tufts University• University of California,

Berkeley• University of Chicago• University of Illinois, Urbana-

Champaign• University of Maryland• University of Oxford• University of Wisconsin,

Madison

Mission:

“How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?”

http://www.projectbamboo.org

Scholars and Digital Collections Study

• Why and how do humanities scholars use digital collections in their research?

• What do scholars need in the functionalities and features of digital collections in order for them to be useful in humanities research?

Needs Assessment Study Participants

• Indiana University• Michigan State

University• Northwestern

University• Penn State

University• University of Chicago• University of Illinois

at Chicago

• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• University of Iowa• University of

Maryland• University of

Minnesota• University of

Nebraska at Lincoln• University of

Wisconsin–Madison

Study Components• Survey and interviews conducted at

15 research universities from fall 2011 through spring 2012

• Web-based survey of randomly sampled English and History faculty members

• 17 in-person interviews of randomly sampled fine and performing arts faculty

How do you use digital collections?

• “Topic modeling, Dunning's comparisons, mining word-frequency correlations, assessing changes in style and thematic content over time ”

• “I study the mass media, so I rely on databases of old television and radio recordings.”

• “I am a historian and I use digitized collections of newspapers, magazines, government reports and documents, legal cases, legal manuals and handbooks, books, etc.”

• “High definition images of papyrus as basis for textual reconstructions.”

Use of Digital Collections: Interviews• Use of digital materials versus physical materials“I use the "real" objects if possible. I use digital reproductions if I don't have access to the originals. Since I don't have access to many of the original objects and images I want to study, I would guess about half and half.”

Interviews• Benefits of Original • Completeness of contents• Sensory experience• Integrate print and digital

“I still must and do consult originals, but for teaching I have always had to rely on surrogates, and for my research, the availability of databases particularly for periodicals, historical dictionaries, and other online primary and secondary sources generally has been an enormous boon.”

Interviews• Benefits of Digital• Portability• Wide accessibility• Preservation“I teach contemporary literature so no one expects me to assign a given writer’s drafts of a published novel. Why should it be any different when it comes to digital images of art that may be housed in distant museums or digitized manuscripts that may be too frail to sustain the wear and tear of hundreds of freshmen’s hands?”

Frequency of Use

36

36

20

7

Frequency of Use of Digital Materials

NeverLess than halfEqual for print & digital mat.More than halfAlways

Types of Materials

Texts Images Maps Video Audio Others None0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%100%

93%

58%

42%39%

4%0%

Types of Digital Materials Used

Text Collection Preferences• “links to related material or bibliographic resources”• “metadata must include rigorous bibliographic information and

stated principles, either explicitly derived from existing modern critical editions or stated as unique to this database.”

• “good word search capability allows me to find all instances of the use of a particular term in a given document collection or diary, narrow dates, search for names (and alternate names) of key individuals, etc. ”

• “capability to be read on multiple devices (e.g., iThing, laptop, desktop).”

• “The ability to annotate these texts in private and public environments, where I could keep stuff for myself or share it with others.”

• “The ability to conduct corpus wide inquiries is still severely limited. Search tools are good for finding needles in haystacks, terrible for extracting data for subsequent manipualtions

Image collection preferences• “Images must cooperate with both Powerpoint and

Word.” • “Ability to export in multiple formats (i.e. jpegs and

higher resolution tifs)”• “information on permissions and how to request

them”• “ability to have a folder of images in the collection

to which I can return that contains all of the copyright and original publication material associated with the image”

• “viewing and zooming tools, color accuracy, ability to export, reliable metadata”

Multi-media collections preferences• “video ability to moderate sound and size” • “ability to embed in other sites (I use my own

websites for drafts of work in multi-media)”• “ability to export and listen/view in another

session”• “Annotation tools”• “detailed metadata, a time counter for audio and

video, downloadable”

Interviews• Areas to Improve• Searchability• More content• Annotation and editing tools

• Current challenges• Poor interfaces and user design• Incomplete contents• Too much data?

Bamboo Workshops• Phase 1 Workshops held in 2008-2009• Qualitiative data from focus groups and

workshops gathered and analyzed by Quinn Dombrowski, Scholarly Practices in the Humanities: Directions, Trends and Opportunities internal report

• Gathered data from workshop discussion of scholarly research practices

• Comparative analysis of workshop data and survey data – How do we map expressed scholarly practices to expressed scholarly needs?

Bamboo Themes of Scholarly Practice

SearchabilityGathering/Foraging

Synthesizing/Filtering

Tools for visualizing relationshipsContextualizing

Conceptualizing, Refining, Critiquing

Research Documentation ToolsDocumenting Methods

MetadataManaging Data

Annotation ToolsAnnotating/Documenting

Modeling/Visualizing

Teaching/Research

InteroperabilitySharing/Publishing

Funding

Collaborating

Citation/credit/peer-review

NEEDS: Curation• “The trick is that the digital collection has to be sufficiently

large (pulling from multiple sources) for it to be useful and often it would be preferable for the collection to have the complete run of a magazine so that I can compare media from different decades.”

• “The ability to control your collection, set up your own library and so on and go deeper and deeper, adding tags, etc. Where it’s less of a skill and more of an expectation. “Personalization of text that in print is crucial.” That’s a big gap.”

• “Better interfaces that allow more flexibility and manipulation of digital images, access to geographic systems and maps to spatialize knowledge in ways that cannot be done with print material.”

• Participatory tagging and other forms of shared knowledge building.

NEEDS: Interoperability• “The challenges are (a) finding resources to make

high-quality digital collections, (b) making those digital collections usable and useful, which requires (c) training humanists to be deep designers of technologies.”

• “I theorize models of historiographic placement, searching, and locatability; so I also consider the various functionality of digital tools.”

• “The easier objects are to repurpose, remix, and reuse the better.”

FUTURE: Access to digital content

CLIR, The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship

“Enabling anything like seamless access to the cultural record will require developing tools to navigate among vast catalogs of born-digital and digitized materials, as well as the records of physical materials.”—ACLS, Our Cultural Commonwealth report (2006)

Thank you!

Harriett E. GreenUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

green19@illinois.edu | @greenharr

Angela CourtneyIndiana University

ancourtn@indiana.edu | @englishlitlib

Nicki Saylor